Clay Clark | Business Podcast | Management 101 | “You Know How Many Committees We Have At Apple? We Have No Committees. We All Meet for 3 Hours Once Per Week & We Talk About Everything We Are Doing.” + The Power of Followup!

Audio Transcription

You know how many committees we have at Apple? No. Zero. We have no committees. No committees. We are organized like a startup. One person’s in charge of iPhone OS software. One person’s in charge of Mac hardware. One person’s in charge of iPhone hardware engineering. Another person’s in charge of worldwide marketing. Another person’s in charge of operations. It’s we’re organized like a startup. We’re the biggest startup on the planet. And we all meet for three hours once a week, and we talk about everything we’re doing, the whole business. And we’re great at figuring out how to divide things up into these great teams that we have and all work on the same thing, touch bases frequently, and bring it all together into a product. We do that really well. And so what I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is. 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 Zuckman. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two 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 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’ll break down the books. She’s bringing some wisdom and the good roots. 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 T upon your radio. And now three, two, one. 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 there. 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. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation that you love every day. It is the Thrive Time Show, your audio dojo of mojo fo’ show. And as always, my name is Clay Clark. I’m the former SBA Entrepreneur of the Year, sent here to teach you the specific things you need to do to start and grow a successful business. And Z, today I’m going to say today’s show is going to be very fabulous and frothy. Fabulous and frothy, those are the two F-words. I’m so excited. I had a great morning this morning. I did something that I haven’t done in years. What did you do this morning? Well as you know and as most of Tulsa knows, I make radio commercials to advertise my business, my main core business, Dr. Robert Zellman Associates. Back in the day, back in the day when my kids were young, they would come on and make the commercials with me, TV and radio. And so now my daughter has graduated optometry school and she’s moved back to Tulsa. And she’s gotten licensed in the wonderful state of Oklahoma. She’s joined the practice and now she’s working there. So this morning she actually went in and made commercials with me for the first time in a very long time. It was just so fun. It was kind of like, yeah, boom, there you go. You’re in a circle. It’s huge, a big boom. Huge, boom. You said in circles, but been completed. You complete me. So she got out there, she did great, first takes, of course, all the on-air person. I was like, wow, she did awesome. I said, yeah, she used to do that quite a bit. So anyway, it was just a heck of a lot of fun. Now inside the box that rocks today, we have an incredible cast of characters. We have my wife of 15 years, the lady who has been putting up with me for a decade and a half, the mother of our five kids, a great addition to the Thrive team. She’s a wonderful woman. It’s Mrs. Vanessa Clark. How are you there, Bird? I’m doing great, thanks. And now we have a guy who is really a beautiful man, and I wish I was related to him. I wish I could say that biologically somehow we were related. But this guy is really my brother from another mother. This is Tulsa’s attorney. You go, hey, I need an attorney. Maybe you’re listening right now and you say, I don’t need an attorney now. But guess what? When you need an attorney, you need an attorney. When it’s time to have an attorney, you already want to have an attorney. You don’t want to wait until you need an attorney. This is Tulsa’s attorney, Mr. Wes Carter of Winters and King. Wes, how are you? I’m doing awesome. Now, Wes, Z, Vanessa, we’re talking today about time management and specifically we’re teaching out of chapter seven of the book Jack Assery that I wrote. This is what it’s called here. Anything that is not scheduled will not happen. Anything that is not scheduled will not happen. So Zee, I want to ask you, this is kind of a deep thought here. Bridget today was doing… Deep thoughts. Deep thoughts. Deep thoughts. Okay, so Bridget today was on the recording schedule with you today, right? Yes, we were purposeful in getting her back on the radio. She had to be there. She’s going to be the future of the business. She’s the face and the voice. And the voice. Now did she mystically appear or did you schedule a specific time and say, hey, let’s meet at this time and let’s record some commercials. I thought I’d say you know what just show up whenever you want. I mean it’s going to be over. We’ll do something about something at some time. So you just whenever you feel like it you just pop on in and we’ll just all be good. You did schedule it though right? I mean we’ll just say hey you know sometime today. You know I mean just come on. So you’re not going to give me the answer that I’m looking for. I’m going to pull it out of you. Of course we scheduled it. Of course I gave her directions. Of course I told her exactly where to go, what time to be there, and she showed up on time ready to go with a positive attitude, and we knocked him out and we had a fun time. So you’re right. It was scheduled. It was purposeful, and if I had done like my little voice was just saying a minute ago and just said, hey, honey, whenever you want, you can just pop in. Well, you know, of course not, because obviously the on-air personalities and the production team, their scripts radio is very busy, and they have to have scheduled. And yeah. But I’ll tell you this, someone’s listening right now and goes, yeah, but your life is super easy. You don’t have a lot going on. In fact, the more money you make, the easier life gets to schedule. That’s so easy. So we’re going to move on to Wes and ask Wes here. So Wes, you’ve been in some courtrooms. You’ve had to call some clients back. You had to review some legal documents. And now you’re here on the Thrive Time show. Did you have to make a schedule? How did you plan your day? How are you not surprised by the happenings of a day? How do you map out your day? Everything goes on a calendar for me. I’m a believer in calendaring everything. So even if it’s calendaring time to talk to someone, it’s a note to my calendar, call so and so, even if they don’t know I’m calling them. Now it’s okay, so you calendar everything. You’re saying that anything you want to do, you put into a schedule. A schedule, yes, that I can get to from multiple devices. Okay, now I want to ask the person with the toughest schedule in the room. This is a mom. So if you’re a mom and you’re raising kids out there, you’ve got a lot going on. You’ve got five kids. In our case, we have five kids. We’ve got a lot of chickens. She’s trying to put an electrical fence around the property. She’s trying to make sure the kids get to gymnastics. She’s always trying to find someone’s shoe. Where is the shoe? Why can’t we all… There’s always one shoe. Why isn’t there not two shoes? We don’t know. This is a bigger issue. We’ll get into that later. Vanessa, how do you sort of map out your day as a mom? How do you just not get… How do you get to a place where you’re not just doing nothing and feeling overwhelmed by just all these demands? Well, I think it’s so important, especially for those in our audience who are mompreneurs, who they may feel like they want to make their marriage a priority and focus on their husband. Also meet the needs of their kids. Be a great mom, but here they are in this startup or whatever kind of business they have. So, you know, I don’t have my own business, but we have our business. So we really prioritize and like you said, take that time at the beginning of the day. So these are the things that must happen. These are the things that are in the business’s schedule today. These are the things that are happening with my children today. And then these are the times where I am, you know, going to be with my husband today So you’ve got to wrap all of those different worlds into one schedule So here’s step number one thrivers step number one You must schedule the events of your life that you want to happen and there’s a notable quotable I want to read to you here. This comes at you from Peter Drucker Who’s Peter trucker Peter Jucker was a best-selling management expert for a lot of people They consider him to be one of the leading experts in modern day management. He says this, he says, time is the scarcest resource of the manager. If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed. Let’s go a little deeper into that there, Z. So if I’m listening right now and I’m going, I just feel overwhelmed, man. I got text messages flying in. I got emails coming in. I got, you know, since this whole internet, the internets, I’ve got now social media. I’ve got email. I’ve got some kind of text thing I’ve got all the smartphones making me dumb. I’m not getting anything done. What do I do? Well, well, here’s what you do. You just give up Just give up and the beautiful thing about it with all the people that have access to you Just let them figure out what you’re gonna do for the day. Let them Let them drive the boat. I mean, you know, just put your destiny, your future in their hands. Yeah. I mean, you know, hey, if they’ve got an emergency or they’re going to talk to you about something, then you need to drop what you’re doing and get to your boat. Yeah, there’s a note of a quotable, I’m thinking of, you know, there’s a quote that says, you know, let Jesus take the wheel. It sounds more like just let random people take the boat’s steering wheel. Yeah. That’s what you’re saying here. Well, you see that happen. So many people, their day gets hijacked. You know, it’s like you’re flying your plane and you get knocked on the pilot door and you open it and some dude is standing there with a gun going, we’re changing the direction of flight. I think the wise woman wizard has something here. Well, I was just thinking along the lines of what you’re saying, when you plan out the things that you need to do, I had a realization lately, I need to plan out what I’m not going to do. Oh boy. You know, I had this realization I’ve been cleaning my house, well not really trying to, but there’s no time. You know what? I don’t have time to clean my house. I need to pay someone to clean my house. Maybe. How much are you paying? Uh, not very much. A hundred bucks. Oh well. I mean, you know, sometimes I need extra money. I’m just asking. I’m just asking. For one, for one ten he’ll do it. Well listen, maybe, maybe I want to pay someone to make some healthy meals. I mean, I don’t know. So you need to look at your schedule and what is your highest and best use and just let those things go. Well if you’re looking for someone to make healthy meals, it’s probably not me. Though I do know how to drive to Whole Foods. I do know how to do that. As I walk through Whole Foods I think, you know, this is doable. I was joking when I started off the show. I said we’re going to make today’s show festive and frothy. But I want to read you the definition of frothy so you kind of understand that I was joking with you a little bit here. Frothy means light and entertaining but of little substance. Oh, we don’t want that. And I think there’s a lot of people that that’s what life is. It’s just light, it’s entertaining but of little substance. They don’t get anything done. It’s just dry gassery everywhere. What happens is, getting back to my analogy, their day gets hijacked. And it gets hijacked by somebody who’s wanting you to do something that’s not on your schedule. And so now you have this balance. Now there are sometimes emergencies that pop up and you have to make adjustments throughout the day. We get that. We are all humans. We’ve all had those kind of days. But for the most part, this is a huge thing. You know, if you get out your calendar from yesterday and you see the things that you had on your calendar from yesterday, all right, and then you save yourself, but I get all those things done and you might see yourself. I didn’t, I didn’t have anything on my calendar. There was nothing, nothing on my calendar. That’s probably why at the end of the day I have been on Facebook most of the day. I went to my job and did my job, but at the end of the day I watched five hours of Netflix. I had something that just happened today. I had something that just happened today. This is very specific. You said hijack. Do you remember the Dukes of Hazzard? Do you guys remember the Dukes of Hazzard? Well, sure. Yeah. Moscow P-Call train. There was that whole thing. Oh, yeah. And then the dog from that show somehow became the Quick Trip mascot for a while. What was that dog’s name? Lamar is what quick trip called him. Yeah, Lamar. So, I remember that back in the day. Yeah, so you want to avoid getting your day hijacked. Let me cue up my hijack music though. This is, you know, remember that? The Dukes of Hazzard? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. This song was great. And they’re always hijacking people’s cars. And the thing was is that Roscoe, he used to basically be distracted all the time. And he was somehow unaware that someone was climbing into his car. This always happened. It would always be the same two guys by the way. Somehow never served real time. But they would take his car and he would always be surprised by it. So this is what happened to me today. I had a meeting today. It started at 6am. So at 6am I have a meeting. Right after that 6am meeting I have a 7am meeting with a property management company. They got here right on time. It’s called Property Management Inc. We had a very productive meeting. And now it’s 8. And what happened was, this is the thing, I go to change my clothes and what happens is I go to change. I have my suits all hanging up because I have my new uniform. And you change at the office. Yeah, I have my new uniform now. But occasionally I have to wear a suit for these speaking events, these suit events. So I had a speaking event, so I had to go change in my uniform. And I open up my wardrobe deal nice and early, a couple hours before I needed to put it on, and I look and someone has knocked down the whole thing accidentally and it’s all in a ball and I’m like, oh no! And so I called my wonderful wife, she came out here and helped me iron all the clothes, get it all together, make it happen, and I will say that one, that’s a problem, but the biggest thing right here is I have to figure out who hijacked my day. Who is the person that did this thing? And then I’ve got to fix it so it’s not a recurring problem. I think a lot of times people, you have somebody sending you a crazy email and you say, quit sending me emails. And then you do it again. Wes, you see this all the time in litigation, do you not? You see people that stay in litigation for, what, four years? Years and years. And what kind of advice do you give to somebody who you see it ending in perpetual litigation? What kind of advice do you typically give somebody who you see, there’s no end in sight, it’s just going to go back and forth. What kind of advice would you give somebody like that? It’s expensive. Very, very expensive. It’s kind of good for business. Yes. You can either spend your time doing business or you can pay me to litigate for the next four years. And I would say this to you, you can either unfriend them on social media or keep responding. You can either block their phone calls or keep taking the calls. Z, have you ever blocked somebody’s call ever? Is this going to sound mean? Okay, here we go. Okay, there are a few people out there that I’ve blocked. Don’t listen right now. But yes, I actually have. Okay, so the thing is that one, Thrivers, you need to schedule your day. Just like Wes said, you need to think about your day and go, what are all the things I need to schedule today? But that second step is you’ve got to prevent people from hijacking your day. And so when we come back, Dr. Z is going to be sharing with us a story about how his day, once upon a time, how somebody tried to hijack his day. What did you do, Master of Time Management? What did you do to prevent that hijacking from ruining your day, maybe your week? Just give us the specific moves you did. A lot of people are listening right now and they go, Step 1, I’m making my schedule. Step 2, oh man, I’m getting my day hijacked and then their day gets derailed. Next thing you know, they’re living in a van down by the river. I hate it when that happens, unless you’re down here by the Arkansas River. It’s kind of like beachfront property down here. It’s practically luxury if you’re living in a van by the river. Oh, I can hardly wait to tell this story. It’s going to be so awesome. Stay tuned. Eat some Oklahoma Joe’s baked beans. Thrive Time Show on your radio. You can be talking politics, but instead you’re talking about making your wallet grow. My name is Clay Clark, the SBA Entrepreneur of the Year. I’m here to talk to you about how to start and grow a successful company. And inside the box that rocks, we have a man who has been fighting diligently against this horrible statistic. Forbes has given us the statistic. We’re not happy about it. The statistic is 8 out of 10 small business owners fail. And this man, this man to my right, if you’re on Facebook Live, to your left, he says, I am not going to allow that statistic to be true. In Tulsa, not in my town, it is Dr. Robert Zellner. Sir, how are you? I’m great, and I have a passion about that. That’s why we’re doing this show. We’re doing this show because we’re trying to stimulate the entrepreneurship spirit within you. And also, we’re also, through mentoring, because you learn by either mentors or mistakes. Oh, mistakes. Mistakes are so costly. I like mistakes. Oh, Stanley. Well, you can make all the mistakes you want. We actually will tell you the mistakes we made, and if you want, you can actually go out there and make the same mistakes yourself. So that is your choice. Don’t get us wrong. I mean, we’re here. It’s a business talk show every day, Monday through Friday, 12 to 2, the Thrive Time Show. And if you miss part of the show or receive yourself, what did he just say? What did he say? You can actually go on thrivetimeshow.com, and we have all the shows down there as a podcast. You’ll miss all the eye candy of the Facebook Live going on here now because we have Vanessa and Wes on here to find people. Yeah, I’ll tell you this. My wife, when I went to college, my wife caused the wandering eye. So I’m trying to focus and I would just drift over and wander. The problem is now we have Wes in the booth and Wes Carter of Winters and King. This isn’t their slogan. I mean, they’re known as a reputable law firm. They represent some of the top ministers and evangelists in the country. They represent authors. They represent local Tulsa business owners. These guys are known for being a great law firm, but I know them as Tulsa’s most beautiful man. That’s what I know them as. It’s just so hard to try to even pay attention to Alzi with this kind of beauty in the box. We have to fight through it. We have to struggle through it. We have to focus. This show is going to be a challenge. We’ve got a great topic today, and the topic today is time management. And that’s a thing I hear a lot from young entrepreneurs, young business owners. I don’t have the time. Don’t have the time. I don’t have the time. And so today, we’re going to help teach you how to get the time. So here’s the deal. Step number one is you have to schedule your to-do list. Whatever you’re going to do, make a call as Wes said, you’re going to edit a document, anything you’re going to do, schedule that beast in your calendar. But then step number two, you’ve got to avoid hijacking. And there’s all different forms of hijacking. Before we went to the break, I kind of explained to you that Z is going to share with us an epic story about how he was able to avoid hijacking. And so I’ve worked with our team to conjure up a great hijacking soundtrack to have ready that will play underneath this epic story. Are you ready? I love it when you go DJ mode. Here we go. DJ mode. Here we go. Do tell. So there I was in my office, snug as a little bug, up on the second floor of my optometry clinic with my one-way mirror glass that looks out on the lobby and the optical area. And I was sitting there going through my list of things to do, returning emails, doing texting, Look, it’s the Wise Wizard, he’s up there working, I see him! answering phone calls, and lo and behold, there came a knock on the door. And I look up, and a young man walks into my office, unannounced, no appointment. I’m here to take all your time? Just there. And he says to me, I’ve got something really important to talk to you. Now this is a person that I know, and so it’s not like completely weird, like a stranger off the street, right? And so I’m like, I look up and I say, oh, oh, Billy. Oh, Billy. Well, what, what, what can I do? And I’m sitting there thinking, I’ve just got that internal kind of like, oh, like, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. I feel like I’m going to get hijacked. And so Billy then plops down because that’s the way you stay where you’re not welcomed as long as you can by sitting quickly. Sitting quickly. Sitting and you want to lose something. You want to lose something you have to find. And you’re thinking of everything you have to do while he’s there. Well, I’ll tell you, you should counteract it. You got to know the moves and what you do is you just rip off the chairs. Oh, don’t sit there, Billy, that chair is broken. No, you can’t, that was broken, too. Billy, watch out! Billy, don’t drop that! This could be it for you, Billy! No, there’s a trap door right there, don’t take another step! No, so then he sits down, and I’m sitting there going, oh gosh, this is going to be a chaos. Yes, what can I do for you? And he goes, hey man, I’ve got a great, great business idea. Here he goes. Here comes the hijacker. And I know you’re an entrepreneur, man, and I know you get business and I just want to run something by you and see what you think about it. You know man, I don’t sound like I need your money, but if you want to invest that would be cool. But I just know you can probably just coach me up on this thing. Here comes the hijack. And I’m like, look at that, and going, you know what Billy, that sounds like a great idea. Now here’s the counter ninja move. Counter ninja move. So I slipped down, I slipped on my black ninja outfit. Slowly and carefully, I put my little black ninja mask on. Right when Billy’s still talking, I tie it off on the back of my head, and then I slowly pull out my samurai sword, and I slowly spin back around in my chair. Now I’m ready for Billy. And I look at Billy and I say, Billy, you know, that sounds like something great for us to talk about, and I’m glad you came by. But here’s what we need to really, before we talk about it, do you have a business plan yet? I mean, do you have something like you’ve put in paper? Have you thought about this previous to now? Yes. Do you have something written down? Because that really helped the conversation. And then Billy looks at me and goes, no, man, that’s a great idea. Yeah. Well, I tell you what, why don’t we, why don’t you get something written down? Let’s get a business plan written down. I’d love to go over it with you. That’s my passion. That’s my heart, Billy. I love to do that kind of stuff. And then why don’t you call my personal assistant. Let’s get you on the schedule. And I’ll be more than happy to meet with you about it. Okay, Billy? Oh, okay, man. Yeah. Cool. But it’s, yeah. Well, that’s a good plan. Let’s stick with that plan. Have a great day. I’ve got to run, but… You just, real quick, you just wrapped it up by asking him to do something that you know that he’s not going to do. Yeah, I’ll never see Billy again. And now that frees up your time. You didn’t have to have a confrontation or a, hey, get out of my office. It was a tactful move. I see you do this move a lot. I don’t know if this counts as an official Icebox move, but it seems like an Icebox move. It’s my move and it’s patented. It’s called the Icebox. And you know what? Anybody listening out there, you can use the Icebox as much as you want and you know what you’re welcome I’m you’re going to thank me down the road you can type in info at thrive15.com now Dr. Z thank you. The icebox is great. Preemptively you’re welcome. And if you didn’t do that you could have very easily been sucked into you know him wanting you to be involved in various things that will never happen. If he hasn’t got a business plan together more than likely he’s not going to take the steps needed. Right. Just talk about his coffee shop idea. And your time would have been wasted. Yeah. So that’s what you do. You take that idea and you go and you put it in the ice box, right? And so you just put it on the ice, you put it and you just kind of cool it off and you say, okay, do this, jump through this hoop, do this, and then let’s get you on the schedule. And he might do it. You know what? Billy out there might. If he does it, then all of a sudden he qualifies to occupy your time. But if he doesn’t, he’s wasting your time. Ding, ding, ding, ding. You just hit on a golden nugget we need to touch on. Oh, now here’s the deal, Thrivers. Now, when we come back, we come back, Wes Carter of Winners and King, Tulsa’s number one law firm. These guys are awesome. He’s going to be getting into how to deal with the one-hour call that became the three-hour call. And Vanessa’s going to deal with what we like to call the rescheduler. This is the person who wants to meet you for coffee, and they’ve rescheduled three times and now you’ve had the time of three coffees invested when you only wanted to meet them one time. So we’re going to deal with the rescheduler and how to deal with the one hour three call mega move. That’s a dirty move and as an attorney you know what that is. They’re buying an hour of your time and next thing you know you’re there for three hours. How does that happen? How do you deal with it? And Thrivers, I’m telling you what, right now before the break you need to go and find the nearest Oklahoma Joe’s. You need to find it right now. You need to Google that beast. Go find it. Have yourself some Oklahoma Joe’s baked beans and then come back here and join us when we come back teaching you time management on the Thrive Time Show. Oh! All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back into the conversation. We’re broadcasting Inside the Box that Rocks, which is located on the left side of the Arkansas River, the left coast with the most. It’s also located inside the Palace of Prophets and inside the Temple of Boom. It is time to resume the Thrived Time Show. My name is Clay Clark. I’m joined here with Dr. Robert Zellner, Mr. Wes Carter from Winters Inn King, Tulsa’s number one attorneys. Do you have an attorney? Do you have an attorney right now? If you don’t, give them a call because you want an attorney before you need one. And we’re joined here with my incredible wife of 15 years, Mrs. Vanessa Clark. We’re talking about time management and specifically how to avoid the hijackers. Now before we went to the break, we were talking about, we were telling you how Wes is going to educate us because he’s an attorney and he has to deal with this situation. We’re going to call it, it’s Johnny Three Hour. Johnny. Hold on. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Oh yeah. Right before the break, you told me to go to Oklahoma Joe’s. Yes. Now I’m there. I’m listening with my earbuds on my smartphone and I’m in line and I’m looking up at the menu, just real quickly, my move is the burnt ends, I’m looking up at the menu right now, my move is the burnt ends, it’s counter ordering there by the way. Counter ordering. Ordering from the counter. Yes, ordering from the counter. Burnt ends and baked beans. And you know what, you’re there, you’re in line, you’re welcome. That’s Clay’s move too, he does the same meal. It’s meat candy and the best baked beans in the world. It’s what makes America great. And I tell my wife, I’m like, hey, let’s get in the car, let’s take Aubrey to get some baked beans. Do I not do this? All the time. And you take me there and you say, please get something. And it’s good. It’s a good place. But yeah, you love those burnt ends and baked beans. Oh, yeah. Unbelievable. Okay, I just wanted, okay, now they can order. So now we can go on. So here’s the deal. So you find yourself in a meeting that we’ll call him Johnny McThree Hourson. Every time he calls you, you know it’s a three hour gap of your life. Just take it. A three hour window. Just take it. So you book a one hour meeting with him, Wes. You book a one hour meeting to discuss a legal issue. Or it’s a personal issue. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you book an hour. But you know that his default move is everything. He’s the warm up guy. It takes three hours for him to do anything. So that is the situation. So how do you deal with it when you’re dealing with Johnny McThree Hour appointment? Johnny, it’s nice to see you again. Hey, good to see you. I just need to let you know that I have something I have to get to at two o’clock. Absolutely. And I know it’s one o’clock right now. We have a full hour, but just let’s just make sure we make good use of our time because I’m going to have to cut us off at 2 o’clock. Absolutely. Now I see you using the old bookend move where you’re kind of telling me when the meeting ends when you have to go somewhere. But you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to open it up to a personal story. You know, Wes, there’s a story. Sixteen minutes later, I’m still going, still winding up there. How do you curtail when he gets into that long form story, Wes? And maybe I’m just meeting Johnny, so I don’t know that I need to bookend him yet. So you get to the end and you have a decision to make. Either stick it out with Johnny because I’m billing him by the hour. Or if I do that, I’m going to delay all the rest of my appointments for the day. Or tell Johnny, look, I’m really sorry. I’d love to continue this conversation. I have another opening at 6 p.m. If you’d like me to call you back, we can go there. Glad to bill you then. Right. Isn’t your first appointment free? Isn’t that the deal with attorneys? I mean, I can come in there and take as much time as I can squirrel away from you. No, no. You can toss me out. That’s why we have to put 15 minutes on that, because Dr. Z would be in there for three hours. Fifteen minutes? I can’t even tell you one good story in 15 minutes. This is how it happens. It’s like, we have an appointment here. Someone wants to see you named Robert. And you’re like, is that Dr. Zellner? No, it’s Robert. Come on, I know that it’s Dr. Zellner. And then he just keeps changing his voices and different moves and he’s got all the different ways to get in there for those free 15 minute consultations. I’m going to tell you a move that I like to do. And this move I like to do with Johnny Longform Appointment is I like to give him a time to meet that I know he won’t do. That’s my move I do all the time. It’s like 3 in the morning or something ridiculous? Yeah, because I usually, my first meeting starts at 6 a.m. typically. So I know if somebody who’s a long former, and I know they don’t like it, I would say, yeah, let’s meet at 3 a.m. on Tuesday. They’re like, oh, I can’t do it. And it’s the same thing. It’s a move because if it’s a multiple offender who continually does the move, that’s a move. Yeah, there you go, and that’s right. But you know, what if, what did you call him Johnny make make a long meeting? What was it? Harrison Make three hours in I mean what if he has something really life-changing to tell you about? You know his new his new product. He’s selling that’s gonna change and revolutionize your life I think what you have to do is you just have to get into it and realize when you when you start Conversations that you only live once and you have to decide is this a conversation that I need to be involved in? He’s going to be very aware of how you are spending your time. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, you’re listening to The Thrive Time Show. Now I have one more tip for how to get out of this long-form meeting. And then Vanessa’s going to tell us how to deal with the rescheduler. So do you remember the movie Tommy Boy? Do you remember Tommy Boy? Oh, I love that movie, Tommy Boy. That was a great movie. Big man in a little coat. I mean, you think about the deeper movies out there. There was Dead Poets Society. Oh yeah, Robert Williams. And then there’s Tommy Boy. I think there’s, which one is deeper? It’s hard to, because the comedy, if you watch it like the fourth and fifth time, the comedy’s pretty rich. Yeah. I mean, have you really watched this before? So the move that I think is the best move is if you know that you are going to be in a long form meeting and Tommy Boy, they’re trying to avoid the police and they realize that like, they don’t have a move. And so what they do is they pull over and they act like they’re being stung by bees. So here it is. Bees! Bees! Bees everywhere! They’re huge! They’re ripping my butt off! Stop that! Roll around! Jimmy, roll around the ground! Forget that, I’m starting to swell up! Save yourself! Don’t be a hero! Frank, I’m allergic to bees. Me too. They’re huge and they sting crazy. We’ll come back later and check on you. That’s a move. That’s a move. The old Z move. I actually had a buddy of mine back in the day was speeding again and he had I don’t know how many tickets. And he sees a police officer lights him up. Woo, woo, woo, woo. And of course he pulls over and I mean he’s just in absolute panic. I mean he can’t get another ticket. I mean I think the way to take away his license. I mean it was a bit of a bad deal. And he’s just held to the back. He’s a teenager. He jumps out of the car with a sense of urgency. Of course, the officer’s like, you know, kind of getting out of his car too. And so they kind of meet each other and he’s screaming at the top of his lungs. He goes, my mom just had a heart attack. And he’s like, oh my gosh, get back in your car. Go, go, go. And the police officer that’s listening out there right now, I would like to apologize for my friend for doing that. That was probably about 25 or 30 years ago. We did not share that move. Now Vanessa, I want to ask you, how do you deal with the rescheduler? Somebody who they schedule an appointment with you and then they reschedule. How do you deal with that? Well, often times, a lot of people will come to me about your schedule and so you are booked out tight. You are booked out solid. And if you’ve agreed to meet at a time, that is great and you expect someone to be there at that time. If they will come to me and say, you know what, I would just like to reschedule and instead I want to do Tuesday at 10. I’m looking at them and that’s great, they want to do Tuesday at 10, but I know you are booked out. I think that the most important thing you can do there is obviously letting people know this is the time I have for you. If they don’t show up to that time or they want to reschedule that time, you are not obligated to give them another time. You can if it works for you and it’s mutually beneficial, but you don’t need to rearrange your whole schedule to get this one random time. Instead, I like to say, let me circle back with you and show you the times we can do, but that’s not going to be possible. Oh, so you’re going with the old direct move. Circle back. Now, here’s the deal, Thrivers. If you’re listening right now and you’re going, I am just struggling to manage my time. You’re not alone. Many, many people struggle with this. In fact, Lee Cockrell, the guy who used to be the former executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts, he said the number one excuse that people had at Disney World for not getting their job done was, I don’t have enough time. And so we come back, we’re going to go into his moves of how Lee Cockerell, the former head of Walt Disney World Resorts, how he would schedule and structure his day to get the stuff done that’s going to help grow the business and improve your quality of life. Stay tuned. Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show, broadcast from inside the box that rocks in beautiful Jinx, America, the epicenter of entrepreneurship. You know, according to Forbes magazine, Z, did you know, according to Forbes magazine, Tulsa has been consistently rated in the top five cities for entrepreneurs to start or grow a business. Did you know that? I knew that, and there’s something in the water. There’s something in the DNA here, and that’s why I humbly submitted who are qualified to do this show. I mean, you, quite frankly, Clay, you really are probably the world’s best business coach and I say that with all sincerity. You’ve done a great job. You’ve grown tremendous businesses. You’ve sold some. You still have some interest in some. And you’ve been business coaching now for how long? Four, five, six? How long have you been business coaching? Well, what happened is in 2007 when we received that Entrepreneur of the Year award, we spoke at Rose State College and a lady there put her hand up and said, hey, I need help with my business. Could you help me? Sure. And then we had a mortgage company reach out. And then it was an insurance company. So pretty soon, we had about five clients. And I didn’t even have a name for it. It was just like, I’ll get you to the top of Google. And because we know no one really knows how Google works, but I had to to make my business work. And no one knows how to do cold calling. And there’s no systems for these things. It’s all like these hocus pocus smoke and mirrors things. So really I would say 10 years. Yeah, so 10 years. So you’ve been doing this. So when you approached me a couple, two and a half now, I keep saying two, but it’s coming up on two and a half years now. When you approached me and you shark tanked me, you got on my schedule, we scheduled it, I came and you talked to me and you cast a vision of being able to scale business coaching, i.e. making videos of successful business people and then having it accessible kind of like a Netflix, if you will. I call it the Netflix of business school, business coaching. And we did that with Thrive15.com. Why is it Thrive15.com? Because we want you to thrive in your business because we know 80% of them fail. And we are going to stamp that out. And why 15 minutes? Because each video is around 15 minutes, plus or minus. You can binge watch all day or you can just do a few videos. You can watch them by the mentors we have on there. We’re talking about great guys. One we’re going to deep dive into here in just a second, Lee Cockrell, who does time management teaching. We have David Robinson, who’s an NBA Hall of Famer who does academy sports and does a lot of businesses down in the San Antonio area. Then we have other great people from around the country. Levine. Yeah, Michael Levine. I keep pronouncing it wrong. Yeah, Michael Levine. He is the leading PR consultant for, he actually personally has worked with Michael Jackson’s family, with Michael Jackson himself, with Prince. I don’t know, Prince? I mean, the purple one. The Prince of Purple, yeah. Pizza Hut, Nike. So we have, these are the kind of mentors we have on there. We film them, we put them in categories, and for 19 bucks a month you can get on there. So when you came to me and you said, listen, I’ve figured out business coaching and I said, yes, you have. You’ve done a great job, but now I’ve got to scale it because that’s every great business to the next level. And that’s what we’re going to teach you how to do on the show is to have a great idea, how to then nurture it into a business and then how to take that business and take it from being a job to an actual business where you can scale it to where you have other people doing it. If you can’t get down time management, if you can’t do time management, it’s tough to do a business successfully. Now, here’s the deal. Lee Cockerell, okay, Lee Cockerell used to manage 40,000 people. So imagine, by the way, if you wake up in the morning and you know you have to manage four people, imagine how that feels a little bit. I’ve been there. I mean, today we’re doing some adjustments to the call center. And so I have to get this stuff on the whiteboard so that everyone knows what’s going on. If not, it’s just chaos. And so this is, imagine 40,000, this would feel like this in my mind. This is how managing 40,000 people would feel. You walk in with your briefcase, you get in there in that parking lot about midnight, knowing that you control 40,000 people. Late, so you’re late? Are you real early or are you late? I don’t know. What you want to do if you’re managing 40,000 people is you want to go to bed. You want to go to bed before you wake up. That’s tip number one. No, but seriously, Lee Cockrell, he made a system where he was able to manage this place diligently and successfully for over a decade. Here are his moves, Z, and we’re going to unpack them. Okay, there’s five moves. Here we go. Move number one, you must have one day timer and one to-do list for your one life. Z, I want your take on it. I want your take on it, Wes, and I want your take on it, Vanessa. Here we go. One day timer, one to-do list for your one life. Why? Why one? Why not having two day timers or two to-do lists? Why do you have to have one? If you have two, then you’re doing two things at the same time. That’s what will happen. And of course, your day timer and your to-do list. Your to-do list is your running list of things you do, the order that you need to get them done, and then your day timers, you know, is actually what I would call a calendar. You want to have, and now, Wes said it earlier in the show too, he said, you know, now it’s so easy to sync all those together with the magic of electronics. Electronics? And apps, and digital formation. I swear I will never use a smartphone. They make people dumb today. When I was a young man, every young child didn’t have a smart phone and they were out there being smart. But now kids have a smart phone, the dumb, I call them dumb phones. What do you think about that, huh? Oswald’s Bagels! Well, they can if not used properly. And if you let them take too much of your life, they do have that kind of effect, doesn’t it? It’s kind of like, what is this? I don’t know, I’ll just Google it. We never broke up on InstaFace. You would look a woman in the eye and say, it’s over. It’s over. But you’ve got to have one master list. You’ve got to have one master list, to-do list. You have to have that. Then you have to have one calendar, one day timer, however you want to call it, that has all your to-do list for that day on there. So I mean, it’s kind of a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people get scattered in that. You know, they may even have someone that said, oh no, you had lunch today over here. And you’re like, no, no, I had lunch. I want to ask Vanessa this. I want to ask this because you have a suburban, you know, we have a suburban. How do you organize it all? Do you just mentally picture it all or do you put it down somewhere? How do you do it? What works well for me is I have some time blocks. I have time blocks of where I know I need to be at the office and focus and that is where my focus is. Then I have a time block where I am with the kids or I am taking them to their lessons. Then I also have some where I know, okay, you know what? I am at the house and the kids are at the house, but I also know I have some free time to work on some stuff independently while we’re all there. So I kind of have blocks of time. And then also I do have things on the list that I know absolutely must get done, but I’m able to delegate those things out and I just check on them later. So they’re still on the list. They’re still important, but they’re not my highest and best use. Now I want to ask you this here, Wes. Wes Carter of Winters and King, Tulsa’s number one attorneys, by the way. The question I ask you today is, do you have an attorney? Because I’ll tell you what, whenever you have a legal problem, that’s too late. You want to have an attorney before that time. So call Winters and King. Learn more about this beautiful man, that great company. They do a great job. Wes, I want to ask you this question. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, you’re listening to the Thrive Time Show. So how do you manage your to-do list? I mean, you’ve got to have a lot of legal documents you’re editing and phone calls you have to have and court appearances. How do you do it? I do. I have, I kind of use two different things. I have a to-do list and a calendar. They work together. Okay. So, as we mentioned earlier, I have a good app. The app makes me keep a great to-do list. Are you using a smart phone or is it a handwritten app? I think one of the things that helped me a lot was a younger me had a home to-do list, a grocery shopping list, a work to-do list, and combining all those into just one master Wesley Awesome list was a big help. Here’s the thing that’s making me crazy right now. This is the thing that’s making me crazy. I see a lot of young entrepreneurs who have a great idea, and what they do is they go, and remember, I am not that, I don’t own this business. They come to me with their business, and they say, listen, I need help growing my business. And I go, okay, cool. I give them a list of things they need to get done, okay? And then each week they come back and go, oh, I forgot. Oh, and then I. This makes you so mad. It makes me crazy mad. And then I go, and I say, listen, I wanna help you be successful, but I’m not gonna continue to coach you if you’re not gonna drop by to get your stuff done. It’s making me crazy, okay? Because by the way, if you make a commitment to yourself and you honor it, it creates this thing called confidence. And if you don’t do it, it creates dissonance, which causes you to feel bad about yourself. The point is, do what you say you’re going to do. And then they’ll say, well, what time management software do you recommend? And I’m like, here’s first for you. I want yellow pad mode. You write that beast down. Then we’ll move on to something next. And they go, well, I’m doing Basecamp, but I can’t get to sync with my Gmail and my Yahoo. And they create a technology barrier Z that prevents them from doing basic things It’s like they can’t find their password bro, and they’re logging in brown It doesn’t seek with I mean there’s a place for technology, but there’s also you don’t to create that barrier Hey, hey, you know what the old kiss rule applies keep it simple Somebody I’ll just say somebody else. I don’t want to say stupid because I would be mean so I’m not gonna say that word But yeah get out a big cheap pad. I like a number two pencil because it’s fun to write with. Go old school if you need to. Circle in those ovals. Oh, love it. Number two, get it really sharp and just keep it good. Go old school. I like yours because you’ve got yours on. Where’s your pad? Where’s your to do list? Mine is out there on the bar. It is on the bar. She’s on the bar. On the bar. And you have it down. You have it highlighted with all your little highlight colors. It’s a super list. It’s a super list that you get done. And you know what? Just go old school on that. You don’t have to have all these 87 different apps that ding and chime. Can we share what the list is? Everyone at home can use this. It is an Excel document. It is an Excel spreadsheet. Yeah, I use just the Google Drive, the Google app there, the Google Drive. And all it does is I can access it from anywhere and every morning I print it out. And if I have anything I need to do, I write it on my list. Now, Thrivers, when we come back, what we’re going to do is we’re going to get into more of Lee Cockerell’s super moves for time management. How did he do it as the head of Walt Disney World Resorts? We’ll tell you when we come back. Boom. Oh, it’s the Thrive Time Show on your radio, and away and away and away we go. My name is Clay Clark, former SBA Entrepreneur of the Year, sitting here by Scripps Radio to help teach you how to start and grow a successful business. One of the things that is a great joy for me is the people we get to have on the show. The Oklahomies that we get to feature on the show. The Tulsa success stories. These regional and national success stories. People that have turned their dreams into reality and who are in the process of turning their dreams into reality and just getting a chance to spend time with some great people. To actually schedule time, to spend time with great people, to be here intentionally with you on the air every day from 12 to 2. And the guy to my right, this guy has been a mentor in my life. He’s a guy who started off as an optometrist, then he went from the optometry business to, what was the next business there, Z? A sleep center. Sleep center. And then auto auction. And then the auto auction. And then a couple of DME companies. Durable medical equipment companies. And then a horse ranch. And then an online school. And then a radio show. And it all just makes sense. Radio show? Oh, that’s this show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So here’s the deal, though. In order for you to build up all these things and to say yes to all these things, you’ve had to give up some stuff. You’ve had to give up some stuff. You’ve had to say no to some things. And so Lee Cockerell says this. This is Lee Cockerell’s step number two from his book, Time Management Magic. This is how the man who used to run Walt Disney World Resorts would tell you how to manage your time. He says, you must assign the right priorities of urgent, vital, or important. What he’s saying is you have to classify what has to get done versus some things that would be nice to get done. So for me today, Meals on Wheels, there’s a guy named Mr. Calvin who’s a former client of mine. He said, hey, I want you to run a call center for me during the month of February. So I had to get that done and I have to get the whiteboard built. And no matter what’s going to happen, I got to get the whiteboard done for the call center management and I have to get that deal done because I said I would. No matter what today, that has to happen. But I had to give up some things. I want to ask you on your daily basis, what are some things that you’ve had to give up that maybe other people go, oh man, I’m spending a lot of time over here and you’re spending none of your time doing that because you had to give it up. Well, can I go old school? Go old school, man. Well, I remember back in the day I was going to Union High School here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was 13 years old. I missed all, I didn’t go to any home football games. Really? Yeah, I wanted to, but I didn’t go. You know why? Why? Because I had a job, a J-O-B, a job, and I learned early on that in order to be successful you had to delay gratification. So I said, you know what, I worked at a restaurant and the weekends were always the busy times. You made the most tips. I was a busboy and so I had a choice. I could not work and make money or I could go to a high school football game and watch the team play. The point I’m trying to make is that a lot of times people think their choices are in time management. It’s really what you’re not going to do but it’s also what you’re going to do in that time. If you say to yourself, well I’m not going to go to the football game but I’m going to sit down and watch Netflix all night, that’s not being as productive as it can be. You’re not really delaying your gratification. You should be working and working on your business when you’re not doing the thing that you would be perceived as fun. Because you know what? Eventually when you build up your business, eventually when you have time freedom and money freedom, then you know what? Then you can go watch any football game you want to watch whenever you want to watch it. Now I want to ask Vanessa this here because you as a mom of five kids and working with me in the businesses, there are things that you give up that maybe other moms who are listening feel like they have to be the super mom and this mompreneur. They’re trying to run a business and they feel like there’s a big… I don’t know what society, because I’m not a woman, I don’t know. But it is a big listening. Women put a lot of pressure on themselves to do all these things that society says, you have to do this and you have to do this to keep up with Mrs. Jones. What kind of things have you had to give up to say yes to what you do now? Well first off, we’re in a great situation. We’re really blessed that I have you as a teammate so I’m not having to as a mom run an entire business by myself. But instead we have a family business and you primarily run all of it. I see myself as your right hand. I’m there to help whatever you need. You’re my life coach. But what I have given up, I guess, is if you have five kids anyways, you have to look and I would say, Havana, you have these three lessons that you take. Which two do you like the most? Because at some point it is too much to take five kids in three different directions each. So I think just going down and saying what is your highest and best for each child, what are their giftings, for myself, how can I best assist my husband, you, and where can I… I used to come into the office and buy all the supplies. I thought this is ridiculous. I don’t have time to do it. Okay, I’m going to have someone else do this. I used to by hand myself do all the taxes. Now I said, you know what? I’m gonna grab this lady to assist me. You get all these things ready for me and then I will oversee it. So really seeing what parts you can delegate out and give to other people is huge for me. And as a mom to know, you don’t have to do it all, but you have to take care of your husband, your kids, and if you have a job assisting there. Now Thrivers, if you’re listening right now and you have a pen nearby, or maybe you’re in your car, or maybe you’re at the office, I want you to just pull over for a second, get out a pen, and I want you to make a list of things that you have to give up. A list of things you have to say, hey, this is a trade-off I have to make to get where I want to go. And while I’m giving you some time to write here, there’s a song that comes to my mind here. You remember Marvin Gaye? Got to give it up? Got to give it up. Oh yeah. He used to go out to parties. You know, he used to do that. But no, he said he had to, here he is. He used to go out to parties, you know, but he says, no, I’ve got to get stuff done. And he used to stand around. No, he’s no longer going to parties and standing around because he’s getting stuff done. That’s Marvin Gaye right there. He gave up going to parties and standing around. Look at the sacrifice right there, Zig. Now he’s getting down. Now he’s getting down. I love that. You’re right. I mean, you have to prioritize. And his step number two, Lee Cockrell’s step number two, is that one thing that I see is that so many people are doing something that’s on their list, but it’s not the most urgent thing on their list. It’s not the thing that they need to get done the most right then. And there is something in your brain that has to click on and say, what is the most important thing? And if I’m not doing that right now, why am I not doing that? And then to try to shift your focus and your attention on there. Because once you check that off for the day, once you check that off for the week, once you check that off for the month, guess what? Then you can go to step two. But if you’re down here wasting time on all this other kind of trivial stuff and then this glaring thing at the top of your list that’s like flashing a red neon sign urgent, urgent, urgent, you’ve got to get on that. See, that’s going to require you to actually think about what you’re doing. No, not thinking. Right? And not just mindlessly going through each item of the list and checking out. I am a robot. I am mindless. Because then you realize, wait, I could have only needed to do half these things and these don’t even matter. I can give to someone else. You need to think about what you are doing and what the purpose is, what you are trying to accomplish. I think part of that is planning time to do something else. Oh, okay. Now, real quick. To the attorney. Now, we call this, at Drive 50, we call this meta-time or above time from the Greek word of it meaning above or beyond. The idea is you want to schedule time in your day to every day to organize your day and to think about where you are versus where you want to be and plan out the life you want instead of just living the life that’s given to you. And it requires you to have a daily discipline to do that. And I want to ask you, Wes, when do you plan out your time there, time planner, guru? When are you planning it out? It’s usually a little bit of both. It’s the night right when I’m done in the evening. I’ll look the next day and try to get a game plan together. And then first thing in the morning, I’ll reprioritize as necessary because sometimes I wake up and I already have 15 emails that are, everybody has an emergency. So it’s like Dr. Z mentioned, it’s knowing what you have to get done. Because if I don’t start on those early, it’s going to be 4 o’clock when I get to those because I’ve been wasting my time all day. I’m missing dinner with my family, putting the kids to bed because I was prioritizing the wrong things all day long. There is a book by Anne Ran, or Anne Ran, this book is called Anthem. She’s also the person who put together the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, you’re listening to the Thrive Time Show One of the the thoughts that she has that kind of blew my mind when I read the anthem for the first time Was that she discovers that people who are successful have found a way to prioritize their life Over everything else and then when they do that they have the time freedom needed to actually help more people It’s this weird thing. As an example, today, I’m just giving you examples, Thrivers, if you’re going, I want to come in the office and see what you’re doing. Okay, well here’s the deal. I have to get the cover made for my new book. I have these books where I wanted to get them all done. I’d written all the manuscripts, so I wanted to get them all done right away. It’s a book called Do Your Job, A Look Under the Hoodie of Bill Belichick. The idea is it’s a fun book for management principles. It looks really good. But I want to get that done so that way many Thrivers would know that I constantly reference the Patriots in their awesomeness and their excellence. I have to say, you must send one to Belichick and one to the whole team. In fact, the whole team needs a book sent to them. I want to. I want to. The thing is, I am obsessed with the Patriots. So I had to design it. I sketched it out. Vanessa knows I went back and forth with working titles. That’s not the kind of activity I’m going to do during my work day. So I have to prioritize, hey, this really matters to me and my family really matters to me. So I have to figure out when am I going to do that. And I know a lot of people who, you want to become an entrepreneur, but for some reason you can only prioritize getting something done for your clients. So for your clients, so you as an attorney, you as an optometrist, Z. You have an incredible wife. There’s always people putting things on your to-do list and you do them because you want to be excellent and you want to be honest and you want to be accurate and you want to do a good job. So good. But are you putting things on your list for yourself that are for you because if not, you’re just going to end up doing what everybody else wants you to do, Z. You’re going to end up just doing everyone else’s to-do list. I tell you, it’s a beautiful thing when you see a person that can manage their life and be what I call a powerful person, what does that mean? That means someone that is doing the things that are on their list, their priorities, and taking care of their stuff. They’re not a rudderless boat in the sense that the wind is blowing and just whatever way the wind is blowing, that’s how my boat is going to go. No, they’ve got a rudder down in the water and they are steering their boat. Sometimes they’ve got to go upwind. Sometimes they’re going against conventionality. Sometimes they’re saying no to people. Sometimes they’re saying no to certain situations. And what they’re doing is sometimes delaying gratification and they are fighting through time waste obstacles like a ninja. Now here’s the quote she has from the book Anthem, which I encourage everybody to read. It’s so good. It’s from the book Anthem. She says, My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Now I read this. This was so freeing for me because here’s an example. When you start a business, you have to work so hard. So when Wes first became an attorney, you’re out there doing whatever you can do to drum up clients. But now you have so many more clients reaching out to you than what you could possibly handle over there at Winners and King. And so you have to decide, is this a good client? Is that a good client? Is this a good fit? And so for me as a consultant guy, before we built Thrive15.com, I was coaching all these individual business owners. And one thing I realized is that if I don’t like them, that is justification enough to not work with them. So I remember the freeing thought of walking into a meeting with a client and I said, I’ve told you like nine times to start the meeting on time. I can’t remember how many times. I can’t go into the next meeting. I can’t stay late. And they’re like, but we’re paying you. And I’m like, let me review this. I don’t need you as a client. My focus today is my happiness. And so henceforth you’re not a client. And I’m going to refund you and then you’re gone. And they’re like, but we need you. The stuff you do, we need to search you. We need the website. We need the print pieces. We need the photos. We need the PR. And I’m like, okay, then I need you to be happy in my presence. At least pretend to like your spouse and not argue in my meetings. And they’re like, what? Because he’s your husband and wife team. What? I mean, no, seriously, do not bicker in my office because I don’t want the negative waves more priority. And they’re like, okay. And the whole thing changed when I let them know that, hey, this is a priority for me. This is a true story. These things happen. So if you’re listening right now, I want you to make a list. What are the things that just irritate the heck out of you that you can control? The things you can control. Don’t make a list about things you can’t control. The things you can control, when we come back, we’re going to dive deeper into Lee Cockrell’s time management super moods. And if you’re looking for an attorney, go over to Winners and King. Check out their website. Hire Wes Carter. Hire Wes Carter. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back into this Thrive Time Show conversation. And with much elation and jubilation, Dr. Z and I are here to help you increase your compensation by helping you dominate that whole time management game. Time management can be so hard. It can be so hard because if you have any level of ambition at all, you have these things you want to do. I’ll call them proactive things. And then you have these things that you have to do called reactive things. So you have things you have to do and you have things you want to do. And if you have any ambition at all, a consequence of that is you have to find a way when the whole world is pushing the Windsor against you. How do you get ahead? How do you navigate that? And it can be so frustrating when you just want to get something done, but you have all these things that are given to you. And it’s so important. You know, this show is all about encouraging you to start and to grow a business. All right? And all of the aspects that come with that. And so you’ve got to understand that the majority of people out there, the majority of entrepreneurs that start a business, they have another job. What? They may have two jobs. They may have three jobs, in fact, because why? Because they’re not making any money. We have an interruption here from Bernie Sanders. An interruption from the Bernie Sanders program here. Oh, no, no. What is going on? People are working more than 36 hours? Are you kidding me? People today should not work more than 36 hours a day. It’s unethical. See you later. I’m headed back to the Limbaugh show. I have a quick question. Sure. For Zee and for Clay and for Wes. You know, I love this idea of the schedule. Everything makes sense. But what, you know, when you’re in that cycle where you are being bombarded, you feel completely overwhelmed, you’re at the bottom. How does someone who’s there right now in our audience, how do they get out of that? They’re thinking, I can’t even catch up to where I need to be, how do I start making a proactive schedule? You just give up. You just give up. You just do it. You don’t want to… You go to get cardboard. Here’s the thing, cardboard makes a fine home. Absolutely. And there’s doses full of overpasses, and most big cities are for that matter. And you just… It’s kind of romantic almost when you think about it. Think about it, Wes, you, me, a piece of cardboard, markers. Let’s pick a nice overpass. There’s a good one over there at 169. I’m thinking there. That’s fine. You know what? I’m thinking the same one over there. No, 169, I-44, where they meet right there. Maybe we can build a two-story cardboard dude path. They have that clover leaf. We could just put a tiny home in the middle of that clover leaf area. I’m sure the property guys. Wes, could we get access? I mean, is that an imminent domain? You can’t technically put a tiny house in the middle of a clover? I’d love to clover areas. Maybe we can get you an easement or something. Oh, there you go. See, you just got to think outside the box. No way. What’d you do, Vanessa? That’s a great question. And just like I was saying a little bit earlier, you know, sometimes you have multiple jobs and you start your business small. You start small and you start to grow it. And it can be overwhelming. Time can get away from you. And let’s say you’re right. Let’s say you’re behind, you’re underneath, take a deep breath and we’re going to take it one step at a time. That’s where you make your priorities. That’s where you say, okay, all right, I’ve got more than I can deal with right now. What’s the most important thing? Just focus on that. What’s the next most important thing? Then just focus on that. Get your master to-do list. That was in our earlier part of the program. If you missed it, thrivetimeshow.com. Listen to the show again. And then what you do is you bosses, see bosses make big obstacles seem so small. So that’s what you do. It’s an overwhelming task, Vanessa. And if you look at the whole thing, you’ll say, give me some cardboard. I give up. Oh my gosh. Yes, I’m going to have Wes give me a name and a domain. I give the clover leaf. I’m just going to build a cardboard house. So there’s hope for people who are in that situation. They just need to realize, you know what, I don’t need to do all this today. I’m doing like what Dr. Z said. I’m going to prioritize and just do the top one. Like the old Chinese proverb about eating an elephant. And I don’t know if it’s Chinese or not. I just want to say that. No, the Chinese definitely wrote a lot about elephants. Well, of course he did. When you have an elephant laying in front of you and you’ve got to eat it, it’s overwhelming. It’s impossible unless you take it down into small little bites. So small. Now, Wes, I want to get your take on this. Vanessa was asking, you know, you’re totally overwhelmed right now. You’re listening. What do you do, man? I think as you mentioned earlier, some of the times you have to cut some of it loose. Yeah. You know, I saw all the news articles yesterday about Trump repealing, repealing, repealing. And I think you have to go out to your to-do list and start repealing some things and taking some of it off your plate that’s not a priority. Either delegate it or decide that those aren’t good things for you to be spending your time on. Now here’s the deal, here’s the deal, Thrivers. I have a story I’m going to share right now, and it’s sort of a backhanded Sean Copeland compliment. One of our generous sponsors here, he is a sponsor for Regent Bank. He’s the head of Regent Bank, he’s the CEO, the president of Regent Bank, and Regent Bank is the sponsor of this show. Oh yeah, they’re a great bank. They’re a business bank. And so if you’re out there wanting to start a business and you say, I’m going to listen to a Thrive Time show and this is the year I’m going to do it, now, oh wait, I’ve got to have a banking partner. Regent is a great banking partner. I’m going to cue up some story time music for you. I love it when you get in story mode. OK, here it is. Here it is. Hold on. All right, so the year was, let’s go, 19, that’s about 2003. Vanessa and I lived in the Silverwood neighborhood, the Silverwood addition. We were the young people who always said, what does your dad do for a living? And I’m like, I own this house. This is my house. My dad doesn’t do anything for a living. This is my house. My dad technically has a job, but this is my house. So anyway, so we’re living there. We got the DJ empire growing. DJConnection.com was growing. We’re getting boxes delivered of equipment all the time. And I meet this beautiful man who at the time worked for Citizen Security Bank at the Bixby Chamber of Commerce. He walks up to me, he’s ten years older than me, he is where I want to be. He’s the head of that bank and he’s the head of the Bixby Chamber of Commerce. He says the magic word, Z, he says, would you be interested in sponsoring the Bixby Blues and Barbecue Festival? Oh wow. And I said, oh I would be honored. See there’s a lot of honor there. And so I said yes. Next thing you know… I just want to clarify. I think it was a huge event, but we weren’t necessarily getting paid. It was the first event. We were honored to be sponsoring it, so we weren’t getting paid. There was so much honor. But we were sponsoring. Keep going. There was so much honor. But this was the first year they had done it. Yes. And so I remember talking to him, and I’m going, okay, I can do this. Well, then I look at the order, the list of what stuff we need to get, and I have to get like a 100-channel mixer, and I have to get a Sir Winn-Vegas subwoofer and all these speakers. Because you were a DJ for like events and weddings and all that and this was a big band, right? They wanted full on live music, correct? Exactly. And so I ended up hiring a guy named Branham who ran the sound. The guys ended up living at the park literally for three days. Not figuratively. They did not leave the area for three days. The Washington Park there in Bixby over there by the river, they stayed there for three days and it was kind of raining and such. And you had to buy tons of equipment. Like $20,000 of gears just for this event, right? We wouldn’t be able to do an event again after like this because it was really out of our niche. And then I think because it was out of our niche, we didn’t do like… I mean, what was Sean’s reaction when we were done? He was grateful. Sean was very grateful, but I was very hateful because I was working there. And what happened was the trade-out consisted of media coverage. Oh yeah, we got in for free too. What happened is Fox showed up and they panned the camera and said, we’re reporting live here on Fox 23 at the Bixby Blues and Barbecue Festival. People are having a great time here folks and the camera pans by and I’m like, Mom! Mom! And that’s it. We’ve been waiting all day for that. We had our big time. And after the event I remember thinking to myself, oh my gosh. And you know what I said? I’m never going to lose this relationship with Sean Copeland because I went to the bottom of Hades and back for this man. And you know what? We’ve stayed friends this entire time. That’s how I met Sean Copeland, was doing that event. And so the apex of the story is Sean, he’s a great guy, he stays in touch with his friends and he honors relationships and that’s how we met. The bad news was I devoted an enormous amount of time to a completely unprofitable activity that I would never do again unless I was completely out of my mind and unable to, I don’t know under what circumstances, the entire space-time continuum. I need to add one thing. I think it rained, too, and the equipment all got… It rained the entire time! It was like a monsoon! So, Zee, when we come back, we’re going to help people get out of that doom loop where you find yourself volunteering for the Bixby Blues and Barbecue Festival without compensation for three days straight in the rain. Stay tuned. Welcome back to the Planet’s Best Business Show. If you’re wanting to start or grow a successful business, you have found your show because we are in the know of what you need to do to start or grow a successful business. We like to have a lot of fun on the Thrive Time Show, but we also like to teach you very practical steps and tips that we’ve learned from tycoons, from our own experience, from millionaires, from gurus, from everyday success stories. One in particular that we’re talking about today is Lee Cockerell. He’s one of our Thrive15.com partners. He’s the former executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts. He once managed 40,000 people. It’s even hard to say that. It’s hard to say that. 40,000. I mean, it’s so many people. That’s a lot of zeros there for you, Clay. That’s a lot. It’d be like managing Wrigley Field. It’d be like going to Wrigley Field for the Cubs play and looking around and going, all you people, you’re with me. Let’s go that way. I mean, just think about that. Nobody’s not drunk. Yeah, the bleachers, you get beer. Everybody over here, peanuts. There, we’re done. I manage you, you’re done. Bam, dune. You four guys put on a shirt, then you come to work. Okay, here’s the thing is, so we’re talking about his moves. There’s five moves, as we kind of paraphrase some of the moves in his book called Time Management Magic. And this next move is you must fight procrastination. Now procrastination is a bad thing because what happens is people who are procrastinating, it kills their self-confidence, it kills their momentum, it kills their joy. It’s not good. Procrastinating is when you know you need to do something, but you’re not doing it, see? You know, Clare, you know what I’m going to do? I think I’m going to fight procrastination tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’m going to fight it. Tomorrow’s a better day. Right now, I’m going to be busy. Tomorrow’s a much better day to fight procrastination. I’m not going to… You know what? I’m busy today. I’m going to fight it tomorrow. We have the Patriots going to be in the Super Bowl here, so I’m going to memorize every single player statistic before I do anything related to my director. I’m going to roll up my sleeves tomorrow and I’m going to fight some procrastination. I’ve got to get on Facebook and update myself. I was kind of hoping Z would fight him in his ninja outfit again, go back to the mask. I might do that. I’m going to put that on tomorrow too. I’ll put that on tomorrow too. Here are moves, these are modern procrastination moves. I’m going to bring them up. I want Wes to tackle this first one here, Wes. You were having some of three at curveball. This is Wes Carter. Ooh, curveball. Wes Carter, the attorney of choice for most of Tulsa. A great American. He is Tulsa’s number one and most humble lawyer. Wes Carter, Winters and King. Here’s modern procrastination move number one. One is you go, well, you know, Facebook, there’s a lot of updates I could make. I could update my photo. I could update my galleries. What I could do is I go to LinkedIn. I could update my status, my profile, my resume. Oh, look, my Twitter has not been updated recently. And so I’m spending like seven hours a day on my social media updating my things that no one looks at anyway. Boom. How do I deal with this? I think you have to schedule time for your marketing. I mean, it works both ways as an attorney or anyone who gets paid by the hour. If you’re not careful, you’re behind your desk all day doing things that are making you money, but you’re not thinking about your business big picture. And it works the opposite way. If you spend all your time worrying about marketing your business, you’re not getting anything done. So I think it’s finding that balance that works for your business. But I spend some time thinking about growing and doing a good job on big picture things, but I don’t neglect the day-to-day activities of what people are actually paying me to do. Did you have to have like an aha moment to get there when you realized I’m doing all of this one thing and not even paying attention to the other part? Or you just had it from the beginning? Well, no. I had the winters of the winters in King. I told you when I first started the firm about a decade ago, be careful. You’ll get stuck behind your desk all day doing work because there’s so much work to get done that you won’t take any time to think about improving, growing, being better. I think that’s one of the best pieces of advice I got. So he was like a mentor. He is, yes. Both of our founding partners have been wonderful. And by the way, what’s your website, my friend? Where can people learn more about your incredible law firm? www.wintersking.com or we have one for churches and ministries specifically, which is churchlaw.tv. For all the listeners out there who are in the lobby of Regent Bank right now, you’ve brought your own radio device into Regent Bank so you can listen while eating your Oklahoma Joe’s, you know, your baked beans. It’s hard to pay attention sometimes when you’re eating the baked beans. You get so mesmerized when you begin to put the baked beans in your mouth. It’s hard to listen sometimes. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, you’re listening to the Thrive Time Show. So if it was hard to listen, I got to get distracted a little bit, my friend. What was that website one more time there? www.wintersking.com and www.churchlaw.tv. Now here’s this next move. Now Z, I’m giving you, Lee’s teaching us a move here, what we should do to manage our time more efficiently. But I am giving you an absolute softball and a chance to completely rip me and I’m okay with it. I’m ready, I’m eyes wide open. Here So this is Lee’s fourth move. You must be mentally present at all times, including when driving. So you must be mentally present at all times. You’re in your office. There’s a meeting going on, but you’re on your laptop working on something else while the whole team, the only reason to have a meeting, by the way, is for everyone to get together and who needs to be there to decide on something. You don’t have a meeting unless the people who are there need to be there. So if they don’t need to be there, don’t have a meeting. But if you’re having a meeting, people need to be there. You’re on your laptop, you’re mentally distracted, or you’re me, you’re in a car, you’re listening to John Legend, and you’re mentally somewhere else. Now I know when you’re most mentally present. You are making your to-do list, and I can walk in the room, be talking to you. This happened two days ago, and by the time I get about a foot away from him, he yells and screams and jumps like he didn’t know I was there, because you’re so focused and mentally present on this list you’re making. Would you tase her or something? No, I’m not tasing. I typically put my hood on when I’m doing my to-do list. I have my hood on and I’ll do this and I’ll get my music going and I’m just typing. I’m like writing a book or typing or doing something. I’m just working at it. All of a sudden I’m like, ah! I literally put on my blinders so I don’t get distracted. Now I come in, the past two days I’ve come in like this. Scariest name thing. scarier than anything. I can see why Vanessa would just absolutely, yeah, just freak out. She’s a scary person. A big and intimidating person. Okay, let me have it. Let me have it about being mentally present in a vehicle. You are quite possibly the worst driver I’ve ever been with, that I know for sure, and you could be the worst driver ever in the history of driving. And that’s because you are everywhere else but driving that car. And I’ll tell you what, people talk a lot about generations and different characteristics of generations. We’ve got my dad’s generation, which they call the greatest generation, World War II veterans, and what an awesome generation that was and the sacrifices they made. We don’t even begin to understand that. And then every generation kind of has their, you know, they give them a name, they kind of have tendencies, but that doesn’t stereotype every single one of them. But the millennials, the younger kids of today, being present, even when you’re talking to them is, is pretty, makes me a little crazy. I don’t know that I can have a conversation with them, whether or not, you know, with their phone trying to talk to you the whole time. You’re like, put that thing down Seriously when I’m right it Destroy it here. Let me throw it in the Arkansas River. Don’t worry. It won’t get wet. It’s beach fun out there I have a you can retrieve it. I have a true millennial story that happened in our office two years ago So funny, okay, one guy is showing a guy a tattoo. It’s gonna be a Arrow with a circle on it sure and he’s showing it to their guy and they’re in our office on Photoshop going, bro, this is going to be my new tattoo. And there’s like templates you can buy for tattoos. So the other guys are not even paying attention. I’m serious. This is a true story. The other guy’s not paying attention. Oh, cool, bro. Cool, bro. Yeah, you should see what I’m doing, bro. The other guy’s on his smartphone going, oh, cool, bro. And they’re doing this back and forth. Well, they get to work, and one day, I don’t know what happened, they had their sleeves rolled up, and they literally have the same tattoos. And it’s just so, you know, two dudes. It’s like if you come to work and you’re wearing exactly matching outfits. Day after day after day after day after day after day. And then neither one of them were paying attention while emailing each other back and forth tattoo ideas. They literally went in, had tattoos done, they were the same. I’m like, what are the chances of that? It’s like one in a million. It’s ridiculous. Here’s the trick. Here’s the super move. Here’s the only way you can ignore your phone. When you’re in a meeting or you’re hanging out with your buds or your family, there’s only one super move you have to do. What is it? And when we get back, I’m going to share it with you. I’m going to stick around inside the box that rocks and down some Oklahoma Joes. We’ll be right back. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back into the conversation. We’re talking about time management, how to get more stuff done. I’m going to tell you this. Henry Ford had a quote back in the day and he was talking about how it’s hard to build a reputation based upon what you’re going to do. See that? It’s hard to build a reputation based upon what you’re going to do. No, it’s not. Oh, really? You get the reputation of a procrastinator because you’re always going to do it. And the thing about doing something and becoming a doer is people are attracted to people who get stuff done. Get her done! I want to make sure that as we’re teaching you these moves that we don’t get too far away from our F6’s. Because the whole point of being efficient and managing your time is so that you can accomplish your F6 goals. I’m going to read those off to you. One you have your faith. What are your faith goals? Your family. Your friendships. Your fitness. Your finances. And this just in from our home office, number six is… Fun! What a scheduled time to have some fun. All work and no play. Play a boring dude. Oh, okay. Now here’s the deal, Thriver. So time management, we’re going through Lee Cockerell’s moves. This is the guy who used to be the executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts and a member of the Thrive15.com mentor team. He talks about this move, how you must be mentally present at all times. We just covered that. But now you have to get started. I mean, eventually you have to get started, Zeke. Well, I left everybody with a hanger. Oh, I’m so sorry. I got to put a… We got to have a cliffhanger light that flashes. Well, what happens is I get so worked up, I’m down in Oklahoma Joe’s. I know. I know. I don’t know if he’s putting an addictive chemical in there, but I believe he is, and it’s causing my brain to just misfire. I need to talk to him about what is the addictive chemical that’s completely organic and tastes so good in those Oklahoma Joe’s baked beans. Back to the story. Wow. Yeah, he set it up again for those who missed. Well, what I was setting up was this, is that the super move on how to not let your phones, i.e. smartphone, interfere with your business meeting, interfere with your friendship meeting, um, hey, let’s have coffee, okay, and then you’re on your phone the whole time. That’s not quality time. Or interfere with your family time. There’s only one super move you can do. Come on now, give it to us. And that is, you take your smartphone, i.e. your phone, and you turn it off. What? I know, that’s crazy. Is that today? I think that scares people that just say that can I die louder is that ethical can I die is that well? I heart stop. I thought my heart is kidding Making ability in my phone to keep my butt flowing well here earn off your phone because I’ll tell you this Okay, you put it on so you put on Simon still buzzes right and you’re sitting there And you’re having coffee with one of your best friends and you haven’t seen him in a while and you’re catching up with life and you’re talking, you’re face to face, and you’re having quality time as we call it. One of the five love languages. You’re having quality time and you’re just having a great time and all of a sudden you have your phone tucked underneath your leg and it buzzes. And they’re like, oh God, I wonder who that is. I wonder. It could be an emergency, but I’ll just peek. The next thing you know, you pull that phone out and say, hey, we’ve all done it. I’m watching you at the coffee shop. Peeking is where it all goes down. Don’t act like you haven’t done it. And then all of a sudden you do the slide out move and you’re looking at it. It’s like my staff. There are no phones allowed on the floor at the optometrist clinic. They’re supposed to be up in their lockers. You get a 15 minute break every so often. You can go up there and check. If it’s an emergency, they can call the landline and say it’s an emergency. Get Billy on the phone. So there’s no excuse for emergencies, right? And so sure enough, the other day I’m walking through and I see someone in their scrubs pull out their smartphone and do the move, right? They pull it out. Do the move. And they’re looking down. They’re looking down. It’s a super move. And they’re looking down at that smartphone. No one can tell they’re doing it. I know. Yeah. No one’s seen them, but I’m sure they’re looking right at them. And then they slip it back into those scrubs and they look up like nothing happened. And I’m staring right at them and they kind of look back over and they see me and I’m like, really? Really? One, you know you’re not supposed to have it down here. And two, you’re going to do it in front of me? I mean, can you at least wait until I walk by before you take a peek? Now I have a slight rant I want to go on here. This is fueled by Naval Ravikant, okay? He’s the guy who, if you get a chance to look up AngelList, it’s a company that connects venture capitalists to potential start-ups. And Naval is the guy who started AngelList. He’s a guy who’s very successful, he’s a multi-millionaire, but he decided to peace out of the game. He said, hey listen, I’ve made a bunch of money and I’m peacing out. So he built AngelList and he basically has a very sustainable income and he just doesn’t want to participate in the game anymore. And one thing he said during an interview with Tim Ferriss, which I thought was interesting, is Tim was talking to him about Facebook and how relevant he wants to be. And he goes, now he invested in Facebook. Naval and Peter Thiel, these guys invested in Facebook. And he explained this. He said, let me tell you how we designed it from the inside. Facebook is a product where you, Facebook is a product and you are the product. Work with me. He says, so every time you update your Facebook and you input more information into it, you now are more, the product gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So we want you to stay active and more involved and more involved and more involved and more updates. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, you’re listening to the Thrive Time Show. He says, we want you to put all your photos in there. We want you to compete with the Joneses. We did all of it. We designed all of this stuff to cause you to engage all the time. And so that you feel like you’re trying to compete in a game you can never win. We used gaming mechanics to build this, which is why I never go on it. I don’t either. And that’s what he was saying. And Nival was saying this, and Tim Ferriss is like, what? So you mean you were part of the team? And he’s like, yeah, I know. It was created to create a, it’s like a video game where people always want to go to the next level. I don’t play video games, so I can’t relate necessarily, but it’s like they want to keep playing. And they built Facebook to be that way. So all I’m saying is if you’re listening right now, those notifications, man, those are designed to sell products. So you’ve got to be careful. So Vanessa, I want to ask you, because you’re a mom and you’re a woman, and obviously Facebook, with our age, Facebook is something we kind of went to college with and it became a thing there. What are your rules for Facebook? How have you tried to tame yourself from Facebook? Where do people get Facebook wrong? What can we learn about this? I do have a Facebook. Our kids, none of them have a Facebook. But I have a Facebook. I know you use yours strictly for marketing. I go on. I don’t always do posts. I think my first kind of… They’re not political. I said I didn’t like something the other day. And man! What did you say you didn’t like, by the way? I did not think it was right for Barron Trump to be bullied the way he is. I am a mom. I have a kid who’s… Who’s Barron Trump? I know Trump, but who’s Barron Trump? It’s Donald Trump’s son. And it just is a mom. It touched my heart, so I just put that out. And people are on you. Oh, man. Did you say something about Sasha and Malia when they were bullied? And, you know, and I in the end, it came around and the girl ended up saying to me, hey, I appreciate you being on here. And but I just thought, OK, this is why I don’t post anything political. So usually I just share. Trolls come out. Yeah. Yeah. Usually I just share pictures for my family so my mom can see my dad who he lives in the states the way he can see. So I think it’s a great way to share. But you’ve got to know what your boundaries are. And of course I had the epic story I shared the other day on Clay, which he was too embarrassed to talk about. I’m not talking about that. Now I want to ask you, what are your digital boundaries, my friend? How do you get started and avoid that smart phone killing you, taking your time, distracting you all the time? You have to write deep, legal documents. You can’t be screwing up on that. How do you put on the blinders and focus? Well, during work hours, I have to keep my phone available just for text messages because some of my clients have been lucky enough to get my cell phone number and so they contact me there. And I made a mistake by giving out your cell phone number for referrals for a long time. I’m so sorry about being the cause of that. But hopefully my beautiful wife is not listening right now because at home it’s a struggle because people call you, contact you. Facebook is not so much a problem. I can’t really scroll down more than three posts without my blood boiling about something and I just turn it off. But the text messages and the emails, I have to make a conscious effort to shut those down. Clay’s got a move for that. Do you want to share the move? What? My move? Share your super move. My super move on my Facebook? No, not your Facebook. He was saying that the phone seems to be more. I just turn it off. I hate to say this. If you are listening, you are going to be mad. But this is what I do. Basically on Friday at 5, I turn my phone off and then I’ll pick it up Monday again like at 6 a.m. This week I looked at it and I am not kidding. I learned this move from Peter Thiel, the guy who funded Facebook. I read his book, and he was talking about this. He calls it time management. He calls it digital delay. But some people email all the time, like every two minutes, and if you respond, they’ll just keep doing this all the time. So what you do is you don’t respond from Friday until Monday, and usually they’ve solved their own problem when you see it. They’re like, oh, never mind. I’ve got to figure it out. And this happens all weekend without me knowing, and my brain would literally explode if I engaged in that. Now, Z, for people who want to go deeper into time management, deeper into planning out their schedule, deeper into becoming successful, they have three things that they can do right now, my friend. I’m going to say they have four. Four? I’m going to fight you on this. I’m going to say four. Thing number one, they can go to thrive15.com and explore the world’s best online business school and business coaching platform. It’s just $19 a month. Thrive15.com. You’ll spend more at Starbucks than having the meeting with your friend while you’re checking your phone out. You’ll spend more than $19. What’s food number two? The dose. Well, we have in-person workshops. They’re usually monthly, but you can get on thrivetimeshow.com and see when the next one’s coming up. We just had one last week. Big, big success. And if you Google Thrive 15 conference, you’ll find all about it. Yeah, there are tons of reviews from people who are there. I think we had 128 video reviews and they’re really good stuff. The third thing you could do is you could say, listen, I want one-on-one business coaching. I need that one-on-one mentorship. And again, you go to thrive15.com and just schedule a free consultation with a coach and we’ll get you taken care of. And Z, what’s the fourth one? The fourth one is so obvious, Clay. I don’t know. Look around you. Look around you! The Thrivetime Show! Talk Radio 1170, Monday through Friday, 12 to 2. You can catch the podcast on Thrivetimeshow.com. Yeah, go up there, get those podcasts, sharing is caring, share with somebody. And as always, the 3, 2, 1, boom! I mean, I remember some bills of $4,500 a month just to get leads that I was having to pay for, and that’s only get a lead and a contact to where now I’m paying you $1,700 a month and I got 80 some leads last week alone and I paid you $1,700. And to me, that was huge for my industry. That was one huge thing that just blown me away. Okay, folks, money is a magnifier. That’s what it is. Money is a magnifier. It’s an amplifier. It just makes you more of who you already were. So as an example, if you’re a complete jerk and you make a lot of money, you’ll become a bigger jerk. And on today’s show, we’re interviewing a longtime client who’s a really nice, kind, decent person. He doesn’t claim to be perfect, nor do I think that he’s perfect, but he’s a guy that I use over and over and over. I utilize his services to plant trees and do landscaping for my family, for my business, because I really enjoy him as a person. I consider him to be a friend and it’s been awesome helping him magnify and grow his business. And without any further ado, we have the founder of Outside Inc., Paul Sullins. Welcome onto the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Doing good, Clay. Thank you for having me. So, Paul, I got to ask you here, and correct me if I’m wrong, I’m looking at your tracking sheet, which for anybody out there who’s a client, we look at the tracking sheet. And last week you had 89 leads. So 89 people reached out to you to inquire about hiring you to do landscaping, pool maintenance, backyard work or them outside remodeling kind of work. And then I’m looking at your tracking sheet like a year ago and you were getting like four or five leads on a weekly basis. Can you maybe walk the listeners through what it feels like to be on the receiving end of 89 inbound leads in one week? It’s a little scary, to be straight honest with you. It’s awesome just to know that the amount of work up front that we put in is actually paying off. You know, you see these you see these people, you hear all these things and you’re like, hey, it’s going to be there, it’s going to be there. And it’s been kind of mind-blowing to sit there and, you know, one of my office ladies comes in and goes, we’ve got 56 calls in one day, right after a rainstorm. And to actually realize the work and the effort that we put in is actually coming to fruition, it’s been amazing. What I’m going to do is I’m going to pull up your website and I’m going to showcase what you do so people can get a little context. I know you’re not a hologram. Outside ink irrigation, outside ink irrigation is one of the websites. Also, folks, if you do a search on Google for outside ink and the word HULSA, you can find the website outsideink.co. So, two different websites there. When you go to outsideink.co, we look here, we look at the services you provide. It’s French drainage, it’s landscaping, you do monthly home maintenance. If you look at the irrigation services, you guys are doing irrigation system repair and installation. So you’re not the only guy in your market who’s providing irrigation systems or French drains, but you’re consistently getting a lot of leads. So I want to focus on the four aspects of business growth. There’s a lot of them we can focus on, but I want to focus on four today. The first is marketing. You’ve got to get reviews from happy customers. Every single week I harass you about this and every week you show up with more, but these are actual customers that have actually done business with you. Can you talk about the importance, and I’ll hit play, but I’ll hit mute as I’m playing these. Can you talk about the importance of gathering objective video reviews from real customers each and every week. What kind of value has that made when you’re even talking to prospective clients? It’s made a lot of difference. I mean, a lot of the phone calls, you know, we’ll sit there and go, hey, we’re the highest rated, most reviewed company in Tulsa. We’re doing all these things. And they’re like, yeah, we know. We went to your website. And, you know, we saw the clients speak speak about what you had doing it what you had done around the their houses and how well you communicated with them and that’s how we decided to work with you guys so it’s just you know I’ve put on I’ve put on so many different client reviews and interviews on the on the web page and it’s it’s been completely different you know through some of your training and seeing some of your different videos from business from the business shows that you put on, Clay. I’ve noticed that we don’t have to have the best looking and the most entertained TV produced videos. It’s just getting videos of real people in their backyards, in their yards, and actually talking about you as a person and the products that we’ve done for them and how they’ve enjoyed it. How often when you meet somebody, and again we’re focused just on marketing right now, when you meet with somebody, how often does the potential buyer reference the fact that you, they’ve watched a video review or have looked at examples of video reviews on your website as a percentage? How often do they reference, yeah, I’ve seen some of the videos or I’ve seen some testimonials? Percentage-wise, I would say at least 25 to maybe 50%. I have a couple different sales guys and I have some ladies answering the phones here and I mean I’m hearing it all the time. I’ve got an office right next to the lady answering the phone and you know she goes, hey how did you hear about us? Well, you know, we googled you and then it’s like, oh hey, you know this, this, this and they were like, oh yeah, we saw, we already looked at your website and saw the, saw all the views, all the video reviews you’ve done. So, I mean, it is, it’s all the time. It might be more than that, but I would say in the neighborhood of 25 to 40 percent. And again, if you’re talking about marketing, folks, we’re talking about marketing to VISM. There’s other details, but everyone needs to remember this. VISM, video reviews, images, search engine content, more reviews. Let’s hop on to I, images. You’re constantly gathering images of your projects. So it’s not an event. I think a lot of people think planting a garden is an event, and it’s not an event. I think people think that getting married is an event. It’s not an event. I think people think that raising a child is an event. It’s not an event. It’s a process. Every week, you’re gathering images, before and after images of projects you’ve done. How has that paid off, just the consistency of adding before and after images of projects? It’s actually done it quite well. It gets my guys, number one, it helps my staff and us know that, number one, you know, because as the owner of the business, you can’t be on every job, you know, as you grow. It helps me know that the guys are doing what I’m wanting them to do in the field. My company is actually being portrayed the way I want it to be portrayed. Then also, people always look at a company and look at, you know, we pull up at a nice fancy truck and they’re like, oh, these guys, all they’re going to do is the big fancy jobs. And not all our jobs are big and fancy. I mean, we talk and we work for the average Joe, the average person in the background. So when they’re able to look on, you know, and see some of these photos of just a little small French drain, or we poured a little 10 by 10 concrete patio, it actually helps us relate better to the clients and the customers in the field. I feel just having all those videos and pictures. Just to be super clear again, video reviews, got to get them every week, images of projects, you do a great job with that. Search engine content, our team handles the optimization, the ongoing updates on the website, so you don’t have to mess with that. How much does that help for you knowing that you don’t have to go in to your website and figure out how to code and update a website every week? There is no way I’d be where I’m at if I had to sit there and mess with that. You know, running a company, a lot of people always say starting your business is an easy thing. It’s managing it and keep on top of it. And these little details like this, I mean, we’re in the age now, word of mouth is one way, but most everybody’s going to Google and go to your website to see how to get hold of you. And that’s the marketing we are in today, society. And I think that is super important to have that up and running. And when I don’t have to mess with it, it will blow me away because, I mean, I’ve got to deal with my employees. I’ve got to deal with all this other stuff. And so it’s just a huge peace of mind to know that that’s just taken care of. I don’t have to mess with it at all. Now, so again, we go back to this VISM. And I think one way we learn is through repetition, video reviews, images, search engine content, the ongoing optimization of the website. We handle that for all of our clients. And then M, more reviews. We’re never done getting reviews. And so right now, if somebody goes to Google and they do a search right now and they type in Tulsa tree planting, which is how I originally heard about you was I was looking to plant trees at one of my properties. I went to a church called Church on the Move, a really wonderful church that at the time was led by Pastor Willie George. And the trees looked incredible on the property. And so I kept asking people, who does the trees? Who’s doing the work? And I kept hearing your name. And that’s how I first met you and now today when someone types in Tulsa tree planting, you come up top in the search results, 703 reviews. You’re constantly getting video reviews, images, search engine content, more reviews. Let’s talk about that for a second. How much has it helped you to have the most Google reviews, in addition to video, but the most Google reviews? It gives you validity. I really think with people, I kind of tell this to people all the time, is like how I talk to my buddies of mine that own businesses and or in the in any kind of a service industry and I’m like, what do people do now nowadays? They go to Google, they Google. They’re Googling for French grains, they’re Googling for this, they’re Googling where to go eat. And if you, you know, to be at the top of Google gives you the opportunity to actually talk to the client and to bid it. Now, you know, we still have to go out and sell the job to the client, but it’s been very important and very helpful to be able to be at the top to be able to get that. I don’t know if I quite answered your question. No, this is great. And you’ve got the four aspects of business I want to focus on today. Again, step one, marketing and branding. We covered that. Branding is anything people see. The website, the print pieces, the logo, the auto wraps. We handle all that with you. We do a lot of that work behind the scenes. That’s marketing and branding. The second step is sales. Sales is converting an ideal and likely lead or an ideal and likely buyer into an actual buyer. And I believe that a lot of times, and I’ve worked with companies in the past that helped me with my marketing when I was first starting DJConnection.com, and I would say, well, yeah, I’m getting a lot of leads, but I’m not selling anything. And they would say, we don’t really help with that. We just focus on the marketing or just the branding or just, I want to get your thoughts on the sales thing. You do a very good job of tracking. I won’t show your tracking numbers on today’s show, but you do a very good job of tracking. This is how many leads that came in. This is how many people bought. How has that helped you measuring and tracking your sales? Number one, it helps me because as I’ve grown, I’ve got multiple salesmen that work with me. Number one, I’m able to see what my guys in the field are selling every week. It also gives me time to see, or not time, but gives me the capabilities of looking and seeing how our ebbs and flows are in my business. Because I’m an outdoor service company. So in the springs and the falls, it’s able to see when I need to gear up for employees, when I need to gear up and get guys ready for stuff, when our down times are. So over the last two years, I’m able to go back and look at it going, hey, January and February is gonna be real slow December. So I really need to start as a business owner in October, you know, September and October, start pushing sales and start finding different ways to be able to get more business to keep my guys going so we can book out over that time. So if I wasn’t able to track my sales, my leads coming in, the jobs were sold, I wouldn’t know, you know, you get so busy in your day in day out, you don’t focus on that stuff and, you know, me meeting with you every week as a business coach and able to sit there and look at that stuff every week, you get trained to be able to look at that stuff and be able to see stuff ahead as you’re growing your business and not looking at the rearview mirror going, man, I wish I would have kept that going or wish I would have known about that six months ago because then I would have been able to adjust then to help us now. Now I’m sitting there going, hey, I’m gonna make money to pay bills and we got to get some jobs sold. And I’m working in the rearview mirror trying to get stuff closed that we should have been working on three to four months ago. Now most of the clients I work with, I charge clients a flat rate of $1,700 a month plus a small percentage of growth. And the idea is hopefully I’m the cheapest employee that you have. You know, so look at it and you go, okay, I’m paying this guy $1,700 a month, okay. Hopefully I’m the least expensive person on the payroll, the least expensive line item. But over time, once we produce fruit, hopefully that small percentage of growth, that small percentage of the growth makes it all worth it. You know, and so that’s the idea is to achieve that true win-win. And so the next, the third aspect of the business coaching I wanted to cover on today’s show is management. So you look at a great project like this, you got to do marketing, branding, true. Step two, you got to do sales. But three, you got to manage. And I think that most people who are self-employed feel sort of isolated and annoyed. I feel like most self-employed people feel isolated and annoyed. They feel like, am I the only one seeing the level of jackassery that is often allowed in the American workplace today. And I have to work with all my wonderful clients to teach best practice management systems. I think you do a fine job of that. That’s something that you, in my opinion, is one of your strengths. You do a very good job of communicating the expectations directly to the client, and you manage those expectations. You tell the client, hey, Mr. Smith, hey, Ms. Smith, we’re gonna have your pool remodel, or your pool fix, or your pool house fixed, or your outdoor siding project, your outdoor landscaping, we’re going to have your retaining wall. We’re going to have whatever the project is, we’re going to have it done by this particular day. It’s going to cost this amount of money. And you do a very good job of managing that relationship with the client and then managing those employees behind the scenes. Can you talk to us about the importance of just mastering management techniques? Well, I don’t know if anybody’s ever a master. What one of the things I’ve learned, and I’ve had clients over and over in my field sat there and go, man, when you said you were there, you were there, you were there every time you said you were gonna be there, and you did what you said you were gonna do. And that, number one, I like to be a man of my word. I mean, I like to be able to tell people when we’re gonna be there. You know, I work in the outdoor industry. I mean, it rains. We’re in Oklahoma, so you’re gonna have delays. But setting those expectations with the clients, number one, helps me to be able to go, hey, it’s rain, I can’t get it. We’ve been delayed because of this. And setting those expectations up front makes for a happy end product with your clients. And just going through the process, say, hey, even when I sell the job, I’m like, hey, we’re the highest rated, most reviewed company in Tulsa right now, and here’s the reason why. But that also comes with, we’re really busy. We’re not gonna be able to get to you tomorrow. And the thing is, the people that can get to you tomorrow are probably not gonna give you the best product. And setting those expectations with the clients up front, letting them know, hey, we’re going to be a little behind. We’re, you know, we’re six weeks out, we’re eight weeks out, and letting that client know that and then keeping them up to date, then the client knows, hey, they just didn’t take my deposit or they just didn’t take this and just disappeared. They know that, hey, we’re coming down, you know, we’re there, we’re still there, we’re going to get the duck. So I think that’s one of the things that’s helping really to set that set with your clients. And it makes it important to them at the end because they know, I mean, a lot, some of these jobs are an investment for the, you know, their backyard. It’s a lot of money for them on some of these projects. And it’s just like, you know, buying a house. You want to know that you’re getting what you’re paying for and it’s going to be there when you expect it to be there. And we could share just hundreds of video testimonials or Google reviews. I’m just showing some examples here. But again, the final area I wanted to cover on today’s show, again, just making sure we’re recapping, marketing and branding. That’s how you generate leads. Second step is sales. You convert ideal and likely buyers into sales. Three is management. You have to manage the expectations. And then the final step is accounting and what I would classify as merit-based pay. At the end of the day, it’s not how much money you make, it’s how much you keep. And I just don’t think that most people think about that when they’re growing a business. And that’s becoming an increasingly part of our ongoing conversations is making sure that you know, because, A, you’re the kind of guy that quotes a customer a price and you hold yourself accountable to not changing your bid on the client. But that doesn’t mean that subcontractors or employees won’t try to change the game on you and all of a sudden drive up your expenses. So can you talk about that, that final step of just the accountings? I think a lot of entrepreneurs, when they reach out for a business coach or a consultant, they don’t think about the accounting. But I would argue, as we continue to grow outside Inc., the accounting aspect of your business is becoming a bigger part. I firmly agree. I just actually just came out of a meeting talking about accounting and bills and what’s coming in, fresh on my mind, you know. And as you grow your business, one of the things, I think as you’re young, you’re just trying to get jobs done. You’re just trying to get whatever you can go. But as you grow, it becomes a huge part. It becomes, I think, more than what most people think it’s gonna be. And getting, you know, keeping the money and keeping the accounting, it’s just like this last year, Clay, I mean, you’d been talking about, you know, doing merit-based. Because I think once, if you give, if you pay people enough where they’re comfortable, they stay there. They don’t want to grow. You know, as your business grows, you want to grow, you want to give them more money. You know, most people want more money. I think everybody would, you know, not frown against getting some extra money, but as a business owner, you want your salesman, you want your guys out there in the field wanting to be able to make more money. And if you just keep them on a hourly basis, there’s no growth for them to perform better and to make more money. So this last year, I’ve switched my sales guys to 100% commission. I used to have them above base and I put them over to commission. And the amount of calls of clients looking for their bids has got cut down in over half. He’s selling more jobs by, I would say, 30% to 40%, maybe more than that, since we’ve been tracking it. And it’s made a huge, huge thing. Because the thing is, if he doesn’t sell, he doesn’t get paid any money. And so, you know, especially when you find people that are eager to make more money, they’re going to sell more. You know, this is one thing I wanted to bring up and I’ll let you go here because I know you’re a busy guy here. For anybody other that doesn’t know this, you know, when I built my first company called DJConnection.com, after every event we did, I was obsessive about calling the bride after the wedding and asking them to leave us an objective review. Now, this is before Google was super relevant, so we had WeddingWire and TheKnot.com and those kind of things, or we would get video testimonials on an old-school video camera we had back in the day. We would archive them. And at a certain point, I remember I talked to a bride and she said to me, you have thousands of video testimonials. And I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. And then now today people go to Thrive Time Show dot com. They click on testimonials. And I had a call I had just the other day with a wonderful man. And he was saying to me, I was going through your testimonials and I had to stop around like page 30 because I kept looking at the testimonials, I realized there is really no end in sight. I mean, I’m looking at this and there’s like years after years after years of video testimonials, and I said, well yeah, because we document that. That’s a very important thing that we do, but I want to ask you this question. For anybody out there that’s thinking about coming to one of our workshops or scheduling a free 13-point assessment with myself to go over how to grow their company. What would you say, or maybe what kind of impact do you think that business coaching with our program has made on your business? It’s been huge. One of the things I love, you know, the problem is a lot of times with business owners is they’re I feel, especially with me, you know, we come from for my instance, I come from, I call it W2 employee status, you know, working for somebody and said, Hey, I’m going to go out here and start my own business. Well, I didn’t go to business school. Nobody’s told me the next steps. What, what I really need to focus on because, um, as you grow this business, I’m like, what is it there? You know, you can read a thousand books and what’s made it huge for me is to be able to come along, you know, have you come along beside me and such and go, Hey, you need to focus on this and this is why you need to focus on this and this is why because When we get when we get down and what I call the trenches as a business owner. You’re sitting there going man If you all you do is focus on that you can never focus on what you really need to do You can’t focus on your accounting and stuff like that and it’s been amazing It’s actually I don’t know how much it was growing my company so far in the last two years But it is the peace of mind is unreal because I’m not looking at my numbers at the moment, but it has been huge. It’s just like, I used to have to pay, I think we were paying in the neighborhood of $4,000 a month just for leads, just to get leads in now, two years ago. I mean, this time of the year, I remember some bills of $4,500 a month just to get leads that I was having to pay for and that’s only get a lead in a contact to where now I’m paying you $1,700 a month and I got 80 some leads last week alone and I paid you $1,700. And to me, that was huge for my industry. That was one huge thing that just blown me away. And I’ll say this too, you are a client that’s more private about your numbers. That just goes with your personality. Some of my clients are a little bit more flashy. They love to talk about their sales and their sales. But I can say this, I was looking at year over year. So you take the month of May when we’re recording this and you look at this week, last year, and last week you had eight leads. So last year, this week you had eight leads, from what I can tell on the tracking sheet. And this week we had 89. So whatever that’s worth for anybody out there. And again, you know, we have some of our clients that like to talk about gross sales and Paul keeps it more private and that’s totally fine. So I just encourage everybody out there, you can have a tenfold increase in your number of leads, your amount of activity, you can do it, but you gotta be a diligent doer. You can’t just be a hearer of these words. You have to implement what you’re learning. And Paul, I really appreciate you for making the Thrive Time Show World headquarters look incredible. Thank you for the maintenance you provide. Thank you for the work you provide. And again, it’s been awesome serving you. So again, thanks for your time today, sir. Thank you, Clay. Have a great day, buddy. Take care. Bye. Bye. I’m Glenn Shaw, owner of Shaw Homes in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Started the company in 1985. At that time, it was one employee doing everything. Me. I met Aaron Antus in 2007. The top three things that Aaron did for Shaw Homes was he brought in processes that helped us be able to repeat over and over. He brought in unique hiring skills. He was able to find the right people for the right seat on the bus, and Aaron brought sales techniques that we weren’t familiar with up until that time. When Aaron came, we were selling about 80, 85 houses a year, and during the 16-year period, we sold sales, get up over 400. The only sales manager we had was myself, and I was completely unable to perform that job. And so, Aaron brought major changes and great results with him. In the many years that I was building houses before Aaron, I was great at selling if somebody wanted to buy. But they had to be knocking on my door asking me to sell them a house before I could actually make that sale. I had no sales techniques and no ability to generate sales. Aaron coming in as a natural salesperson just absolutely transformed that and made the sales experience better for the company. I’d sit in a model home over the weekend and I had a salesperson or two, but I was actually out there all weekend working that. Since hiring Aaron, I was able to take my weekends off, even reduce my workload during the week. I went from working 60, 70 hours a week to almost a normal workload. So I’ve been a member of the Builder20 program in the National Association of Home Builders for 25 years, 20 years. And during that time, I’ve seen a lot of sales managers with the other companies that have been involved. And in my opinion, Aaron is smarter and sharper than any sales manager of any builder that’s ever been in our group. Now, some markets, they don’t have to try to sell, they just sell themselves. But with the ability to sell and to train and hire, Aaron was better than any of those sales managers that were in my program. Well, I remember when I considered hiring Aaron many years ago, the thought of spending the extra money was a little scary, but in hindsight, it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It freed my time, increased our sales, and at the end of the day, increased our profitability beyond my wildest expectations. Years ago, I was concerned that if I didn’t do whatever a customer asked me to do, it might be the last house I sold. And so, over time, we were able to move away from unlimited customization to pre-designed options. The problem that we were having in those days is that the customer would tell us what they wanted, but they didn’t really know what they wanted. And we would deliver exactly what they told us to do, and they wouldn’t be happy with it. So as we became more standardized, we give lots of options, but we don’t customize. And in the end, that allows us to sell more homes for better margins than spending countless hours trying to customize in just every avenue of the sales process. We get weekly reports on sales, on profitability, on production, and it provides all the manageable tools that I need to review the company from a 10,000 foot level. All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, what we’re gonna focus on is how to grow a successful company. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna pull up a graphic that is the theory of how to grow a successful company, but vision without execution is hallucination. And so if you go to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash millionaire, you can download a book that I have written called A Millionaire’s Guide, How to Become Sustainably Rich. You can download it for free at thrivetimeshow.com forward slash millionaire, but you have to actually implement that which is in the book. And so on today’s show, we’re joined by a very successful person in the home building business, a great friend of mine, a man by the name of Aaron Antus. Aaron Antus, welcome on to the Thrivetimeshow. How are you, sir? I’m doing great, Clay. Thanks for having me on. Hey, so I got to ask you this for people out there that want to prove you’re not a hologram. First off, what’s the website for your company so people can verify that you are in fact a real business. You bet. It’s Shawhomes.com. S-H-A-W-H-O-M-E-S dot com. Shawhomes.com. I’m pulling it up. Shawhomes.com. Pulling it up. That’s the website. Shawhomes.com. And when you and I met, before we met, you had been already very successful as a home builder. You turned your dream of being a home builder guy into reality. And so how many homes had you sold or what kind of sales had you done in your career as a home builder guy before you and I even met? Before we met probably about 750 million in sales prior to meeting you. And then you did the year we first started working together what were the sales totals that year? We were at like 19 million. 19 million and then when you ended 2022 obviously we’re in 2023 and so we’ll see how this year ends. But as far as ending 2022, how much sales did you do last year at the end of 2022? 2022, we were at like 84 million. Okay, so from 19 million to 84 million. 84 million. So you’re doing some things right here. And what we’re going to try to do is kind of demystify the plan here. Okay, so here we go. So establishing revenue goals. Yep. When you and I first started working together, we started off with a 13-point assessment. We went over your goals. I’m not going to ask you to share your goals on the air, but why is it important that you have goals? Well, I mean, goals are sort of your guideposts that you set something out there in front of you and you start chasing after it. And without that, you’re just kind of floundering in mediocrity. You don’t have any reason to get up in the morning and really get after it. And so, you know, I think goals are, you know, it’s you can have lots of different types of goals. And we’ve talked about a lot of this. We’ve talked about, you know, having financial goals and having, you know, fitness goals and having friendship goals and just all these different areas. I know you’ve got the F6, you know, so that’s kind of something that, you know, we touched on very early on. You asked me, like, is the goal, is one of your goals more income or is it more time? And so I said, well, really, at this point, it’s more income. And then later it became more time. So, you know, it’s changed over the time I’ve known you since 2016. We’re going on seven years and the income went up considerably. So now it’s, you know, turned in the last couple of years towards more time. Now, the break-even numbers, again, I’m not asking you for the numbers on the show, but you guys have a lot of fixed costs. I mean, if you go to shawhomes.com, you’ve got framers, you have plumbers, you have tile people, you have so many skilled people, you have a full-time sales team, you have an admin staff. And if you don’t sell a house, you still have the service of the land, you still have all the overhead. Why is it important for every listener out there to know their break-even point? How many deals they need per month just to break even? Well, yeah, because you’re going backwards real quick, and it doesn’t take very long if you’re at the beginning of your business. It doesn’t take very long for you to be in a place where, you know, the creditors are knocking at your door, and you can’t pay your bills, and all of a sudden you’re going to lose all your, for us, all of our trades, all of our suppliers are going to start backing out. So you’ve got to know what that number is that lets you tread water so that, okay, this is the worst case scenario. Everything above that, at least I’m into the profit zone. So you go out of business pretty quick. Most businesses don’t last more than just a few months if they get below that breakeven number. Now folks, again, these might seem like simple steps, but they’re all the linear steps you have to take to create time, freedom, and financial freedom. And if you want to grow your company, this is how you do it. Box number three, though, is you have to know the hours you’re willing to work. Now, your incredible wife is here off camera for accountability, so at any point, you know, she could yell like, amen or boo. But you guys are on the same page with the hours you’re willing to work. And you guys, as a couple, I want to brag on both of you, you guys both committed to sacrificing time and energy and a lot of things to get to where you’re at in life. And then as you had your children, you raised them, you decided to devote time to raising said kids. And now that your kids are older, you’re devoting time to raising these kids. So it’s not like you advocated being a parent while also growing a company. You did both well. I’d love to get your thoughts on sitting down with your spouse, if you’re watching this today, or your significant other, and making sure you’re on the same page about how many hours per week you’re willing to work. Well yeah I mean you don’t want to grow a business to you know make a whole bunch of money just so you can split it in half later. Oh. Because that’s kind of what happens when you don’t work out those details ahead of time and so my wife and I have been married 25 years we’ve been together for four before that and so yeah 20 sorry 26 did I just say 25? I hate to do this to you. I just got in trouble. I hate this. Your wife just turned 27 on Thursday, and what you said is 100% false. Okay, so the unique value proposition here, now let’s talk about this. Whether it’s growing a home building company or a dog training business or a haircut chain or a carpet cleaning franchise or whatever business we’re involved in helping to grow, you have to sit down as a listener out there, as a business owner, and you’ve got to figure out what makes your company unique. Absolutely. So I want to ask you, what makes Shaw Homes unique in the marketplace with other home builders? Yeah, we have more furnished and decorated model homes than any other builder in the market. So, you know, a lot of times people, when they walk into a home and they’re trying to decide if they like the floor plan, the layout, whatever, they usually, most builders in our market have an empty house that they walk into. It’s just kind of echoes when you walk through it. There’s no furniture or anything. And we completely, as you can see in this little video here, we completely furnish and decorate it, make it beautiful. We are the most award-winning builder in the state of Oklahoma. We’ve won like five times as many awards as any other builder in the market. So definitely that is one of our big takeaways. Now I’m going to throw you under the bus real quick, and I don’t mean to do this super passively aggressively, it’ll just be more of a subtle passive aggressive. When I met you, you guys had all these awards, but no one knew. That’s true. It was like this weird, bizarre thing where you had all these awards. I remember talking to you, and I’m like, what makes you guys different? And you’re like, you know, we do a good job, and you’re going to be nice about it. You’re a good salesperson. But I said, well, I mean, tell me about the awards. And you’re like, well, we got this award, that award. This is true. This award, like 45 minutes later, it’s like that award, this award, I need to shave now, this award, that award, I need to go brush my teeth, this award, that award, I want to go mow the lawn now, this award, that award, I’m thinking about retiring, this award, my kids are turning 18, I can see it, this award, and this award, and that award, and so we put those on the website and that helped. The other thing you guys were, we needed to change was all these people were saying great things but we didn’t have video reviews of them saying it on camera. Right. So it was like your online reputation didn’t match your real world reputation. You had so much good momentum there and so many people loved you guys. And now you guys have, would you say, 100 video reviews? Oh gosh, I would say more than that. We’ve got, yeah, we have a lot. Everyone can give them. You can just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. I was scrolling. And this is actually all that’s on this page. If you go to our YouTube channel, we have way more than this. So again, and this is all the stuff. You’re going to grow a successful company, folks. Step one, you’ve got to figure out your revenue goals. Step two, you’ve got to figure out your break-even goals. Step three, sit down for an hour of power. Sit down with your spouse. Make sure that you guys are on the same page of your hours you’re willing to work. Step four, unique value proposition. Figure out what it is that makes you unique. And we have an in-depth guide that you can download for free at thrivetimeshow.com forward slash millionaire if you get stuck. Next box, you got to improve your branding, your website, your one sheet, in your case model home presentations, business cards, social media branding, everything that a customer sees needs to be first class. And I was talking to a guy named Ronnie Morales today and it’s Morales Brothers. I think you met him at a conference. He told me, and I’m not slamming Ronnie. Ronnie, if you’re listening, I’m not slamming you, this is the real thing. Ronnie said he’d listened to our show for seven consecutive years before ever reaching out. And now he’s reached out and he’s up 57% in about eight months. That’s awesome. And we’re going to put his story on part two of today’s show because he’s in Texas and he’s seven years behind you, but he’s doing a great job. What do you think that thing is where people have bad branding and we’re not aware of it? Someone hasn’t brought it to our attention? What causes bad branding? You know, the number one thing I hear business owners say is, well, you know, I don’t really need good branding because I sell everything by word of mouth. Oh, yeah, baby. I’ve got such an incredible reputation. You do. Everybody just comes to me by word of mouth. And then it’s like, okay, yeah, but how much business did you do last year? Well, not very much. And I’m really unprofitable, but I’ve got great reputation out there and I get a lot of word of mouth. So when people switch over to starting to improve branding, I know you helped us a lot with that in just creating a lot better looking website, creating a, we’ve got an office environment now that is, when people walk into our model home, they are blown away. We truly wow our customers when they come to our model homes. Yep. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience in the state of Oklahoma. And the process of that, you know, just going through, branding it so that it looks really top-notch. And, you know, that includes everything from, you know, marketing to all of your senses and everything else. So it just really brought us to another level. And when the customer comes in and experiences us after having walked through other builders homes, they usually come in and go, you guys are just on a whole nother level. It’s sights, sounds, smells, experiences, everything that your customer sees, they’re grading you on. And you might not know that they are even judging you because they’re not filling out the form. And I have a funny story to share with you that’s kind of sad. I was working with a fitness guy years ago, and I’m not going to tell you what studies and what study folks, I know you want to know, but I’m not going to tell you. And he filled out the form because his wife wanted him to schedule a 13-point assessment. He did not want to. Yeah. And he tells me, Clay, honestly, I’m just doing the call because my wife wants me on the phone. I got to, I don’t really don’t get leads from social media. I don’t get leads from marketing. I get all my leads word of mouth, like you were saying. And I said, well, let me just do this. Let’s just, this first month working together, let me get all the passwords for your Facebook, your Google, your YouTube. And I’m just, as the first month, we just, with every single client, we optimize your YouTube, your Facebook, your Instagram, your Twitter, all that. We log on, this is a fitness guy. He was spending like 400 bucks a week, every week on ads. And he hadn’t known he wasn’t aware that every time a lead came in, it got stuck in Facebook and went to an email address that he wasn’t checking. Oh, so think about this. That’s like that. It’s like 15 to 20 leads a week for years. This guy had. That’s not good. And he didn’t. And so I’m going, you’re spending, you know, 20 grand a year on ads that you’re not getting anything from. And are you aware that the phone number on your site rings to a phone that’s no longer real a real phone and I’m serious this was real and then he had before and after photos where somebody had had the idea let’s get before and after photos you know where you interview someone before they start working out yeah but then they never completed the thought you know what I’m saying I do where it’s like they interview him about getting in shape yeah but then they never actually like aired the part where they’re in shape. So it’s just sort of like an interview with people that are not in shape. And again, he’s a busy guy, busy entrepreneur, that kind of stuff is very common. It’s kind of laughable if it’s not your company. But okay, next box. You’ve got to determine your customer acquisition costs. How much does it cost you to get a customer? So Aaron, you guys run ads on Google, on Facebook, on retargeting ads. You have massive signage. There’s a lot of stuff you do. Why is it important to know how much it costs you at the end of the day to get an actual new buyer of a shawl? Well because if you want more of those, you know what it costs to go generate more of those. And it’s a cost where it’s like, okay, well, I’m down in sales this month or this quarter or whatever, and I need four more sales to make it a good quarter here before the end of the quarter. And it’s like, I know I can go put money into that and it’s going to cost me X number of dollars per customer to get there. And so then it’s just a matter of, do I want to spend that money to get to that point? So, you know, for us, it’s, you know, a pretty high number cause it’s a lot, it’s a big ticket item, but for some people it might be, you know, very small to get that, you know, each customer. But for us, you know, it’s, you gotta know what the number is because ultimately that goes into the price of your product and whatever you sell, you know, we’re doing homes. That is one of our line item costs in our homes. That’s a cost. Yeah. Now, if you go to any of the businesses that I’m involved in, you go to eitrlounge.com forward slash staff, I put in the password here. Once I put in the password, I have all of the documents needed to run the company. And they’re all saved. So the checklist for the manager, the opening checklist for the assistant manager, the bathroom cleaning checklist, everything needed to grow the company is all in one place. And therefore, the business, everybody who works there knows where to go to find those documents. This is the kind of stuff that fires me up and it makes other people crazy. So with the conferences we do if we were to a conference. It’s out of town I have a checklist of stuff. I print out. I know it seems kind of crazy for people. This is real I put it out, and it’s like okay socks I’m gone for four days. I want to have 12 pairs of socks why because it could be hot I don’t know could get wet I don’t know I have a list of you know deodorant and socks and shaving and I have a laptop and a backup laptop And I have patch cables and XLR cables, and we bring it molten threes you’ve seen all this stuff, but it’s multiple monitors, backup monitors, it’s backups for everything. When you guys build a Shaw home, you’re not moving off of guesswork. There’s blueprints, there’s plans, there’s systems, so houses don’t fall down. There’s somebody out here listening right now that doesn’t have systems in place. They don’t have checklists. They don’t have it. And so they have to think about everything all the time, because if not, they forget a step. What would you say is the importance of having taken the time to have built these systems now. It is the night and day difference between running around like your hair is on fire every day, constantly playing firefighter, or you hear people say, I’m up to my armpits in alligators. It’s because you don’t have systems and processes. And every time at Shaw Homes, every time that we have a problem come up, we automatically go, okay, what step in our system did this fall apart in? And what’s broken in that step? And how can we fix it so it never happens again? So we go fix the process. You know, we address the problem for the customer, but then we go back after that and we go, how do we fix the process so we don’t repeat this problem? And the business owners that are running around with their hair on fire all the time, it’s because there’s no systems, no processes. Everything is urgent. Everything is hair on fire. Correct. And it is a chaos world that you live in. And if you’re going to build homes for a living and build a lot of them, you cannot live in that chaos world. Now this next box, I get excited about all these boxes. This is what I get excited about. This right here is what I care about. Okay. The next box is management and execution. You have people on your team and I’m just going to give some examples and I hope this benefits somebody out there listening. You have people on your team, it’s their responsibility every time that you do a new house, they go out there and they design, they get the blueprint on the website. They get the new design of the home because people wanna see floor plans. So somebody’s job is to get those up there. Somebody gets photos of every house that you guys are building. Somebody gets videos of every house, somebody puts them all up for sale. Somebody answers the phone every day. Somebody calls the leads every day. Somebody cleans the bathroom every day. Somebody builds the houses every day. Now, this is what I find, and I’m sure none of our listeners can relate to this. Some of our listeners fire people, and then nothing happens. So work with me on this. There’s listeners out there that I talk to every day because we do free 13-point assessments. So I talk to two or three people a day who go to thrive timeshow.com. They want to schedule a consultation. And the other day you heard me talking to Jordan. I said, Jordan, go ahead and keep setting those. He set an appointment with someone who’s definitely not a good fit. And you could tell he had a little question if that was okay. And I said, I would rather you set an appointment with somebody than not because I don’t know if he’s a good fit or not. But the idea though is I sit down, I was talking to a guy the other day and he was like, you know, the reason why my team did not get Google reviews or videos reviews this week is because we fired a guy. And I go, cause I’m just asking him, you know, where are we stuck? What’s your biggest limiting factor? I have a big process I go through in my evaluation. I said, who calls the leads? He’s like, well, normally I have a person that calls the leads, but we just fired her. And I mean this, I’m going, how long have you been in business? This guy’s been in business for over 10 years and he’s reaching out for help. Good person. We’re trying to help him. I think it’s going to be a good fit. But so I said, so basically everybody follows the systems until they don’t work there anymore. And then no one does the systems. And you go back and forth vacillating from things being done to not being done. And one of my favorite things about working with you guys is that you’re honest people. What does that mean? You do your best to do what you say you’re going to do, and you hold yourself and the employees accountable. Absolutely. But what would happen if every week, if somebody wasn’t performing, you remove them from the position and then the houses weren’t built for the week because something wasn’t going well or because maybe a salesperson wasn’t performing at the peak, you let them go and the next thing you know, what would happen if you managed your company that way? It would be a disaster. I mean, I can’t just fire my superintendent without having somebody already ready to take over all of those responsibilities because I’ve got materials showing up at the job site today, tomorrow and the next day, I’ve got trades showing up who need some supervision, need to know what they’re supposed to be doing. If I fire that guy with no warning, somebody else has to come fill in that position. So, you know, for us, we try to never have that gap happen. And, you know, sometimes it’s like, you know that you’re going to need to fire somebody and you can see the writing on the wall. Right. But you want to get the next person up and ready to go before that happens. And you guys have a weekly meeting. So we talk a lot of this show from an employer perspective, but how frustrating would it be to be an A-player employee and you’re working for a C-player boss? You know, a boss that doesn’t have a staff meeting, that’s not organized, that doesn’t pay people on time, that’s constantly emotional. I see that a lot. And so management is a learned skill. And thankfully, you know, when I first met with you, you’d already really mastered, in my opinion, managing people. But this next box is where I thought we needed some help, was to build a system for constantly recruiting new people, because certain people work for Shaw Homes for three years or four years and then they want to go move, they want to have a baby, they want to stay home, they want to get a new job. And even though you have low turnover at Shaw, certain people get to their expiration date and it’s time for them to move on to something else. And because we didn’t have a process in place at Shaw at that time to consistently bring in a pipeline of new people, it made it difficult to do the management that was needed. Can you talk about the importance of implementing a human resources program for hiring, inspiring, training, and retaining good people? It’s huge. I mean, that was definitely an Achilles heel for us. And you helped us a lot with that. Putting in a, where every single week, I’m seeing potential candidates that could come work for us, and they’re job shadowing and seeing what it’s like to work in our company every single week. It does multiple things. It helps the people who work there to know, hey, there’s other people who desire to come work here. And if I’m not doing my job, I might get replaced. So there’s a little bit of that. And then it’s also a thing of the people who are shadowing get to see the job being done by people who are happy doing their job. And it helps them to want to come be a part of Shaw Homes. I’ve got a very long list of people right now in every single position that would be excited to come work for us if I did all of a sudden find myself with an opening. You know, because occasionally people leave with no notice or whatever, you know, something happens, family emergency, whatever. Right. And you have that, oh, I need to replace somebody immediately. And the great thing about it is I have a whole bunch of people that I could plug into that position very quickly because every single week I am interviewing. Now the next box here is you got to do your accounting. In order to automate, in order to earn millions, you have to automate your accounting. What does that mean? You have to have a system in place for making sure you price your products and services correctly and that you pay yourself first, that you set aside a set amount of money to pay yourself and your staff. All these things work together. And what I find is people ask me, often just not knowing, they come from a place of a good heart, they don’t know, they say to me, Clay, what is the most important step in growing Shaw Homes? I’ve heard Aaron on the show, he’s a great guy. Clay, I’ve heard PMHOKC on the show. Clay, I’ve seen OxiFresh on the show. What was the most important thing they did? And to me, that’s like asking a hiker, what was the most important step you took to get to the top of that mountain? Well, it was the one we took there an hour ago. I took a left step. No, it’s also, it’s like asking a baker, what’s the most important ingredient? Is it milk? Is it sugar? Is it eggs? Is it, you know, it’s like asking a farmer, what’s the most important thing, feeding the animals or watering them? What’s the key to your success? There’s just certain questions that I understand people want to know, but all of this has to work together and nothing works unless you do. So I have three final questions for you. For anybody out there that’s thinking about scheduling a consultation, a free consultation with thrivetimeshow.com and myself, obviously they’re stuck with me at the Phillipa Forum. I’m the only person that does 13 point assessments. I believe we, I’ve seen it since 2005, we help people decrease their costs, increase their time, freedom and profits. What would you say is the benefit of scheduling that 13-point assessment? Well, actually, the 13-point assessment was very eye-opening for me. You asked me a lot of tough questions that I probably should have been asking myself and wasn’t. And so as we went through the questions, I was like, I think at every question you asked me, I was like, oh, that’s a good question. And I was like, hang on, let me think about that for a minute. So I find that it kind of helps open your eyes to, you know, hmm, these are some things that I know I have some areas of weakness. And then there were, I think, a couple of the questions where I was like, oh, I know the answer to this one. I got this one, no problem. But it helps you sort of identify, I walked away having identified areas of strength and areas of weakness, even though that really wasn’t the purpose of the phone call necessarily, it helped me to see that. And then I was like, hmm, I think I have a need in a couple of these areas and I didn’t really know what to do for my for myself I didn’t have the answers. You know in part three of today’s show part two we’re gonna show the Ronnie Morales story on part three we’re gonna do a testimony with Myron and Myron just bought his first Lamborghini today and he’s super fired up and so Myron’s about six years down the path we’ve been working with you for about eight years whereas Ronnie’s been with us for less than a year. And it’s at a certain point that we have to take action. Knowledge without application is meaningless. What would you say to somebody who’s like, you know, it’s $1,700 a month, and, you know, I’m spending that much right now on random ads and that much money on random regrettable purchases at the gas station, and, you know, a lot of iTunes I’m downloading. I’m spending $1,700 a month on various things, and I don’t know if I can afford it because I’ve just bought another vehicle that I can’t afford but I’m leasing it. What would you say to anybody who’s kind of on that fence? I mean I would say you need to do it. I mean it has been a game changer for us. I don’t know why you would sit there and think $1,700 a month is too much money to spend. Go find the money somewhere. Go empty out your sofa cushions. Go sell the stuff that you have in your house that you’re not using. I mean, go get, you know, whatever you need to do to get to that place, you need to find that $1,700. And I will say this, that cost was very quickly replaced with the extra money we were making. And I’ve seen, I’ve actually seen, because I’ve been around you for a long time, I’ve seen a lot of your clients come in and right off the bat, they’re real nervous about, am I going to be able to, you know, because maybe they’re a smaller company or whatever. And they’re like, I’m wondering if I’m going to be able to handle this $1,700 a month. And then I see them six months later and I’m like, how’s it going now? And they’re like, man, we’re just hitting record after record. I have referred several business owners. And they’re doing great. That are killing it. And that, you know, I’ll give one example. I won’t name the person, but I did send one of my very good friends to you who was on the verge of losing his business because he just wasn’t able. He had bought another one of the shops of what he does. He opened it and it was not profitable and it was going to take under both of his shops. And I sent him over to you and I remember about three months later I asked him, how’s it going? And he goes, man, we just had a record breaking month. This was amazing. And by the way, he said, first, he just had another record breaking month just so you know. Yeah, and I know right now, not only does he have way more income, but he has a lot more time freedom because he’s been working with you for many years now. And so that was, it changed his life, just like it changed my life. I would say, if you’re thinking about, you know, doing a 13 point assessment, stop thinking, dial the phones, pause this video, make the phone call, reach out to Clay, get it started right now. Now, final question I have is, I think people look at oxyfresh.com and they go in, there’s 500 locations now. Yeah. And they look at Elephant in the Room and they go, there’s five brick and mortar locations now. They look at Shaw Homes and they go, you know, these are big success stories. I don’t know that I can do it. What would you say to somebody out there that just feel like they might not have the, like all this stuff they’re going to learn is going to be over their head, too complicated. What would you say? I would say the information, the ideas are easy. It’s the application that is difficult for people. The ideas that you share, there’s nothing that’s like, oh, my God, I don’t have a Ph.D., therefore I can’t do it. I feel like it’s all very, very simple stuff, but it is a lot of action to get traction, and you’ve got to get the action going. And I think if somebody has diligence and discipline or can learn diligence or discipline, they’re going to do extremely well. And it’s not about education, it’s about action. Now, Aaron, I’ve got one thing I want to say, and then we’ll kind of wrap up today’s show with a boom, because boom stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum, and that’s what’s required to have success. People watching this are going, Aaron, he looks like a normal guy. Well, that’s true. They say, well, he sounds like a normal guy. He sounds like an all right guy. That’s true. But the one thing you can’t quite picture on the show, and I want to just give that gift to you folks who are watching, is Aaron smells tremendous. It’s like a, if you had smell-o-vision, if you could just get up there and just smell that, it’s incredible. And it’s really, it’s his aroma that allows him to achieve massive success. So unless, if you’re out there and you’re going, what’s the secret sauce? It’s not a sauce, it’s more of just a smell. So I don’t know if you qualify to have the kind of success he has unless you smell like he smells It’s a really tremendous. Okay. Let’s do this thing with the boom. Here we go. Three two, what boom? Well Thrive Nation. We have an opportunity all the time. We have JT, you know what time it is? 14 it’s It’s Tebow time and told to run baby. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma during the month of Christmas December 5th and 6th, 2024. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma and the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Growth Workshop. Yes, folks, put it in your calendar this December, the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive Business Growth Workshop. 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. And a lot of people have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field. And off the field, the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now, the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Well, they’re going to have to come and find out, because I don’t know. Well, I’m just saying, Tim Tebow is going to 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. Folks, I’m telling you, if you want to learn branding, you want to learn marketing, you want to learn search engine optimization, you want to learn social media marketing, that’s what we teach at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive workshop. If you want to learn accounting, you want to learn sales systems, you want to learn how to build a linear workflow, you want to learn how to franchise your business, that is what we teach at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. You know, over the years we’ve had the opportunity to feature Michael Levine, the PR consultant of choice for Nike, for Prince, for Michael Jackson. The top PR consultant in the history of the planet has spoken at the Thrive Time Show workshops. We’ve had Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, a company that creates apparel worn by celebrities all throughout the world. Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, has spoken at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshops. We have the guy, we’ve had the man who’s responsible for turning around Harley Davidson, a man by the name of Ken Schmidt. He has spoken at the Thrive Time Show, two-day interactive business workshops. Folks, I’m telling you, these events are going to teach you what you need to know to start and grow a successful business. And the way we price the events, the way we do these events, is you can pay $250 for a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. Yes, we’ve designed these events to be affordable for you, and we want to see you live and in person at the two-day interactive December 5th and 6th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. Everything that you need to succeed will be taught at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop December 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the way we do these events is we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a question and answer session so that wonderful people like you can have your questions answered. Yes, we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a 15 minute question and answer session. It’s interactive. It’s two days. It’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ve been doing these events since 2005 and I’m telling you folks, it’s going to blow your mind. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Thrive Time Show two day interactive business workshop is America’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops. See the thousands of video testimonials from real people just like you who’ve been able to build multi-million dollar companies. Watch those testimonials today at thrivetimeshow.com simply by clicking on the testimonials button right there at thrivetimeshow.com. You’re gonna see thousands of people just like you who’ve been able to go from just surviving to thriving. Each and every day we’re gonna 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. Feeling it. Thrive is cool. 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, 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, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russell Oklahoma. I suppose it’s Tulsa, Russell. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russell. I’m sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show in 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. Who? You! You’re gonna come! 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 a business training. We’re gonna 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. Hello, 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. 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 system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. 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 do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? 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, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated 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 and 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 going to the best business workshop ever it wouldn’t give you your money back If you don’t love it We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see you 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 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, at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And we have a special guest today. 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. And so Mr. Clay Clark is 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 hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man, and there’s so many ways we could take this thing. But I thought, since you and 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, 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. You know, 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 too, 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 a thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, Watch what a person does, not what they say.