Clay Clark | Entrepreneurship | Why You Must Sell Something Or Your Business Will Fail + Sales 101 + Celebrating 4 Clay Clark Client Success Stories + Join Tebow At Clay Clark’s Dec. 5-6 Workshop!

Audio Transcription

I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way. I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer to insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63,000 investment. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with a specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced. I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. Hi, my name is Tim Johnson. I’m the owner of Tuscaloosa Ophthalmology, as well as Southern Eye Consultants, two ophthalmology practices in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And I’m a client of Clay Clark. He asked me to answer a couple questions. The first question was, how did I hear about Clay Clark? I am a big fan of business podcasts, and his podcast popped up as a recommended listening so I started listening to the podcast. I was a little suspicious or skeptical because I thought there was going to be like an upcharge or an upsell but the idea of the month-to-month canceling really appealed to me and I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and for the upsell or for the scam to come in but it never did. It’s very legitimate. Since working with Clay, I’ve gotten a much firmer grasp on how business works. Even in medicine, business is business. I’ve learned a lot about marketing, especially how Google reviews work and how important that is. That’s very important, even in medicine. At least once a week, if not every day, I get a new patient because somebody Googled eye doctor in Tuscaloosa or ophthalmologist in Tuscaloosa. And you’d be amazed how many patients just look for an eye doctor that way. And so he’s really changed our business. Our business has grown a lot, maybe 15 to 20% this year. And so we’re really grateful for the things he’s done for our business. And the last question was, when did I perfect the laugh? I would say that you can never perfect the laugh. You just keep working at it and it just keeps getting better and better each day. But you’ve got to keep working at it. 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 This 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 Zuma. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. some wisdom and the good looks. 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 G up on 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 here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. And, folks, on part one of today’s show, I want to talk about how if you don’t sell, your business will go to hell. What? Yes, if you don’t sell, eventually your business will go to hell. And so on today’s show, we’re interviewing an entrepreneur by the name of David Frazier. He’s the founder of a company called Bunky Life. He’s got great bunkies. They look great. They’re bolt-on bedrooms. They’re custom cabins. I like them. You like them. Many people like them. However, none of that matters if he doesn’t eventually sell something to you. And that’s what I want to talk about today because we’ve got so many great clients. And on part two of today’s show, I’m going to share some success stories. But we’ve got one great client by the name of Complete Carpet, great guy based in Tulsa. His name is Nathan. I happen to like him a lot. I think he’s a kind person. He’s a great guy. I’m sure he’s a good husband, these kind of things. But when I met him, his business just didn’t have enough sales. And he wasn’t a bad guy. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart. It wasn’t that he wasn’t kind. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a good husband. It just was that nobody was buying anything. And so we helped him to increase his sales. And on part two of today’s show, I’m going to share with part three of today’s show, I’m going to share with you about a company called Revolution Health. Revolution Health, you can look them up. This is Revolution Health. And I started working with Dr. Edward. Do you know what the problem was? They weren’t selling anything. It didn’t mean he was a bad doctor. It didn’t mean people didn’t care about him. It didn’t mean that he didn’t care about people. Didn’t mean he wasn’t smart enough. This guy had more degrees than a thermometer. And then on part four of today’s show, we’re going to talk about Sherwood, Dr. Sherwood, Sherwood.TV. And you know what the problem was? We needed to have more sales. You know why? Because sales is the lifeblood of your business. And without sales, your business will fail. And I hate to say that, but there’s somebody out there watching today’s show. God bless you. You have a good idea, but you’re just not selling anything with that being said David Frazier a buggy life Welcome on to the thrive time show. How are you, sir? I’m doing fantastic and thanks for having me again I want to get your thoughts on this There’s so many entrepreneurs out there that have great ideas great business plans great systems a lot of education a lot of degrees Product that right could change the world, but there’s no sales. I want to talk about that for a second What is the avoidance that many entrepreneurs have with selling something? I think it’s the same fear that we all have going up and talking to a girl when you’re single. You know, it’s just like, if you don’t actually go up and talk to her, you can’t get rejected. You can just sit there combing your hair and putting on your cologne and flexing your pectoral muscles and doing all of those things. But if you actually don’t go up and talk to her, there’s no sale can happen, if you will, and no rejection can happen as well. So I think that’s the main reason that people don’t really put themselves out there and don’t focus on the sales first is because they want to get everything perfect and everything ready. And then they’re going to go talk to the girl. But the reality is you got to go and practice talking to a lot of girls before you make a sale. Now let’s talk about the sales. There’s a lot of components that go into the sales, but I’m going to focus on three of them today. And I want to get your thoughts on this. First off, most people with a sound mind, they want to look at examples and or testimonials. Most people with a sound mind, they want to look for examples and or testimonials. Can you talk a little bit about that, why you have to have examples and testimonials of the products you sell there at Bunkeylife.com? Why you can’t just have an idea, but you actually have to have the actual examples and testimonials on the website in order to actually sell something? Well, because people want to buy something that they feel like other people have also bought. They don’t want to be the first weirdo to buy this thing. They want to be, you know, they want to be buying something that’s proven, tested, tried, true, and that other people just like them have gotten a successful benefit from. Because the most likelihood of them having the most success is if someone else just like them has had success. That’s the most accurate predictor of whether they’re going to have success with it. So you’re saying that it’s wise for the entrepreneurs watching this show to gather testimonials from real clients when possible. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of what we talk about every week is sounds like captioned obvious type things, but it’s true. You gather those testimonials every week and you gather those good reviews every week, then people start going, oh, I think this might work for me too. Now, the second thing is you have to have a no-brainer offer. You gotta have an offer that’s hot. And I think that’s one thing you do really well there at boogielife.com. You’ve got great products, you’ve got great options, great solutions, but you also have reasonably priced products. You’re not taking advantage of people. I see so many people that price products, they price them in a way where they price themselves out of the market. They price themselves so high or they price themselves so low they can’t possibly make a profit. So what you have to do is you have to look at the market, you have to look at what the market can bear, what people are willing to pay and what your costs are and you have to think about it. Okay, here are my costs, this is what my competition is charging, this is what that competition is charging and I have to price myself appropriately to be competitive in the marketplace, that a little bit. Yeah, I think generally speaking, most people lean in the direction of, well, either extreme is wrong, but generally speaking, most people lean in the direction of being too cheap, I would say most of the time. But it depends on the thing. Is the reality of your product that it’s just a commodity more or less, and they can get it anywhere, and there’s not a lot of risk if you screw it up. I’m thinking of something like a grass cutting. You know, there’s not a lot they can do to really screw up cutting a grass, but if it’s something that’s where like it’s a one-time purchase, like a bunkie is for a lot of people and they really want it to be good and they really want to know what’s going to last, then you can lean more on, hey, maybe that’s a less sensitive, price sensitive person. That makes sense. If you sell something where you assume people are price sensitive, you might want to check that every once in a while and go, is price really the reason you went with us? Or are you just wanting to make sure it’s really great? Another great thing about Bunkies and our business is we tend to serve people that already own some land. They probably own, in some cases, two houses. And so it’s a type of personality that has achieved a lot in life, or maybe they’ve inherited a lot, but they’ve got a lot of stuff going on. They understand the value of like, I just want this done well, as opposed to trying to like save 50 bucks. And when you serve that type of clientele, it’s actually a lot easier and a lot funner, funner is the word I was looking for. Now, so again, step one, folks, you have to gather those testimonials, real proof examples of what you do. Second, it’s really important you have a no brainer. And then third, you have to have a workflow where you wow customers. You just got to create a wow workflow because if you if you sell enough of your product eventually word-of-mouth should be your biggest Revenue source your biggest customer inquiry source should be revenue. I always would get very very concerned you know just a few weeks ago I was talking to a newer client and I was sitting down looking at their numbers and their number of their amount of repeat business had almost stopped and I’m looking at the tracking sheet and and this business was getting more and more business from Google and more and more from search engines and more and more from social media, but their word of mouth had almost grinded to a halt where it used to be a huge driver. And I started asking the owner, I said, you’re in a service-based business, the amount of word of mouth deals is going down, has something changed? And he said, yeah, we put in a new manager. And I said, has anything changed? He said, yeah, we’ve been getting a lot of complaints. And I said, so you’re getting a lot of complaints. That person is driving happy customers away. Okay, we got to fix that. So let’s talk about that for a second. Why do you have to wow? And why do you have to aim to wow every customer and not just satisfy them at BunkyLife.com? Well, like as you said earlier, reviews are what a lot of people are using. Reviews and testimonials are what people are using to kind of gauge you online. But the same thing happens in person. If they say, oh, how do you like your new bunkie? And people go, oh, it’s okay. But like the driver slapped me in the face and then took a dump on my front yard before he dropped the bunkie off. It’s just, it’s gonna just leave, for lack of a better word, a bad taste in people’s mouth. And so you have to make sure that every step of that journey you’ve thought it out, you’ve planned it out, you’ve got a little touch point or something that’s ideally like a, whoo, you know, an unexpected wow moment. And you want to make sure that, um, that happens because, uh, you know, for every, every one or two or three satisfied people, there’s like, they’ll might tell two or three friends, but for every dissatisfied person, they’re telling 10 people and they’re, they’re ripping your name through the mud. So you have to like over emphasize and over index on a really great experience because people only usually talk about things they’re really, really pumped about or really pissed about. You know, and again, these points we’re talking about on today’s show, I wanna make sure that everyone’s getting these ideas. It is so important if you’re watching today’s show, you’ve got to have objective reviews from real customers. It’s so important you do that. Second, you gotta have a no-brainer offer that’s hot. You gotta have an option that’s hot, as some sort of offer, some sort of deal that’s exciting to the customer. And then you’ve got to aim to wow the customer. And that’s what you guys are doing over and over at Bunkeylife.com. For people out there that are interested in learning more about you, tell us about the products you’re offering right now in the final 60 seconds or so, and where people can go if they want to learn more about Bunkeylife.com. Yeah, so head to Bunkeylife.com, that’s B-U-N-K-I-E-L-I-F-E.com And right now we’ve got our kits that we can ship anywhere in North America. You can build them in a weekend with your friends and family if you want, or you can get a contractor locally in the area to build them. They look beautiful on the inside and the outside, and you can put your office back there. You can put your grandma back there. You can put your crafting space, your whatever you want to do. You’ve got basically a bolt-on bedroom that can be built in literally a weekend. This right here, folks, is an actual business that’s actually doing well because they’ve nailed down the basics and they continue to focus on excellence on a daily basis. David Frazier, thank you so much for carving out time today, sir. We’ll talk to you next week. Thrive Nation, there are very few legal ways to get rich quick. Your chance of finding one of those opportunities is very, very slim, or about twice the odds of getting hurt in a commercial plane crash twice. Now, the bright side is that getting rich slowly is actually fun and will yield you thousands of adventures in the process. And on today’s show, we are interviewing a guy by the name of Jerry Vass, who wrote a book called Soft Selling in a hard world. Where he explains in great detail that there are only three ways to really make exceptional money as an entrepreneur. One, you got to work in a place where no one else wants to be. I had a buddy of mine years ago that was an Alaskan fisherman, fishing in Alaska. Sounds like a lot of fun. No, it’s not. I had one of our employees years ago that worked on an oil rig out there in the Gulf of Mexico. Rumor has it we have a couple of podcast subscribers located in the Gulf of Mexico who listen to each and every show. And I know you guys probably don’t enjoy the time away from your family and living on a floating city that smells like oil, but you get paid well, right? The second way to get rich is you can perform work that no one else wants to do. Sales. No one seems to want to do sales. I like doing sales, but a lot of people fear sales. They’re scared of sales. They just don’t know how to sell. And when you can’t sell, your business will just go to hell. And the third way to get rich is to do work that no one else can do. Well, Steph Curry can do that, and you’re pretty awesome at it. Leonardo DiCaprio could do that, and he’s pretty great at it. I mean, Oprah. I don’t know how many people could do what Oprah does. Serena Williams, Venus Williams, I mean, there’s a lot of people out there that are LeBron James that can do things that I frankly can’t do, and that’s why I like to pay people with that kind of skill. I like to watch them. I like to vote with my dollars and say, yeah, Brad Pitt, you’re a better actor than me, Mr. Tom Hanks, you’re better than me. I like to pay to watch your movie. So again, the three ways to get rich are you can work in a place where no one else wants to be, you could do work that no one else wants to do, or you could perform work nobody else can do. And it’s really the last two conditions for making extraordinary money that we’re going to explore on today’s show. You see, learning to sell softly isn’t only about money, it’s about enjoying the process of sales. This little manual called Soft Selling in a Hard World is all about reality. It’s about a survival guide for the strange mastering of persuasion. It’s kind of a strange road to learning how to master persuasion. It shows you the mechanics. Soft Selling in a Hard World teaches you the mechanics needed to sell well. That’s what the book is about. The book is designed to teach you the specific tactics, not the strategy, to walk you through the step-by-step process that you need to take. And the whole system, what’s great about it, is you can learn the whole system and implement the system and write all the scripts and utilize the system in a way where other people can do what you can do. You can make yourself repeatable and duplicatable. So you can create not just a job, but you can create a thriving business that can create both time freedom and financial freedom for you. My friend, selling is the highest paid profession in the world. I mean, our leaders in politics, business, and research, and the arts, they’re all great salespeople. It’s just a lot of times you don’t realize that they’re selling. I mean, you see presidential candidates, heads of companies. I mean, Steve Jobs was legendary for his annual presentations. Warren Buffett, you don’t think of Joel Osteen as selling, but he’s trying to convince you to become a Christian. He’s trying to share with you the love of Christ. You might not think of Oprah as a salesperson, but she’s trying to convince you to tune in and watch the show again. You might not think about President Obama as a salesperson, but he’s trying to get you to vote for him. He was trying to get you to vote for his ideology. So if you’ve ever struggled to sell well, this show is for you. Or if you’re very good at sales, but you’ve ever struggled to teach a team of people with no experience to sell, that’s where the magic is. Can you teach an army of people to sell well? If you’ve ever struggled with learning how to personally sell or how to teach an army of people to sell, you are going to absolutely love today’s show as I interview a great man, a wonderful friend of the show, Jerry Vass. Jerry Vass at the age of 83 is now retired, enjoying the high life there, living in Florida, enjoying his home in Jacksonville and the fruits of his efforts. But he decided to come on to the show. My friend Jerry Vass decided to come on to the show and to share with us the answers to so many questions that I had as a result of reading his book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. If you don’t have the book, get it today. Get on a pen and pad. You’ve got to get a piece of paper. This is a show where you’ve got to take a lot of notes, and I would encourage you to get Soft Selling in a Hard World today. Without any further ado, my exclusive interview with Jerry Vass. Also, just a quick disclaimer. I apologize for the audio quality of this audio only interview, but his phone was kinda cutting out a little bit. We tried to edit it the best that we could. And so, with any further ado, here’s Jerry Vass. Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to another great conversation. And on the Thrive Time show today, uh, Chup, I could not be more excited to have the man that I would consider the godfather of systemic sales. You see, back in the day, Eric, I started working in the world of commercial real estate. One of my clients wanted to go into commercial real estate, and before we exited Fears and Clark, we actually had the commercial real estate listings for one-third of downtown Tulsa. That’s roughly 33 percent. And do you know, do you know what what sales book we use to build our scripts, our systems, our process, the entire system that we used at Fears and Clark when representing Canbar properties and roughly one-third of downtown Tulsa. Do you know what system, what book we read, Chuck? What book was it, Clay? Soft Selling in a Hard World by You, By you, Mr. Vass, how are you, sir? I’m perfect, thank you very much. And I want to tell you, I’m flattered by all of this. I’m not used to doing this anymore, because I’ve been out of the training business for 10 years, because I got old and my mind went, my mind took a vacation. So we’ll do the best we can. Well I appreciate you, and you are much sharper than I am. I aspire to be half as sharp as you think you once were. I mean, you are, you are, your book is amazing. The book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. And in that book, Jerry, you wrote, if you aren’t selling up to your potential, you probably don’t understand that selling is a game. Most people don’t. Those who do make 85% of the money become executives or run their own successful businesses. This book is about fulfilling your potential without resorting to motivational and inspirational beliefs. As in sports, you find that certain mechanical moves need to be mastered before your inspiration or genius can shine. Like a dog, a dog can be inspired to chase a car but doesn’t know what to do with the car once it’s caught it. This knowledge is about what you do when you catch the car. That thin slice of face-to-face time with the buyer when persuasion really occurs. Jerry, I’d love for you to expound on this. And that’s such a beautiful excerpt from your book. I’d love to get your thoughts on it. Surely. Well, I use the word game in the sense of a professional sport. And just as any professional sport, one has to understand the game, develop and polish the skills needed, and have a plan for the big contest. In selling, that translates to getting your story together, getting your tools ready, and practicing your delivery. Then putting it all together under pressure and from the perspective of the client. You may hear someone say, you know, if my job doesn’t work out, I can always sell. You never hear them say, if my job doesn’t work out, I can always be an NFL quarterback. Right. Right. And I think the preparation that you teach in your book is what allowed me to be successful. Because Jerry, when I was sitting down meeting with somebody about listing their commercial real estate, they would ask me directly, how many other listings do you have? And I would tell them we have this many listings, and they would say, what makes you different than the competition? And I had it all on a one sheet. I had all my sales presentations. I had all my testimonials, all my statistics. I had a system for it. I had incorporated all seven of your selling moves. And it helped me be proactive so that I could lead the conversation, build rapport with the buyer, find their needs, deliver benefits supported by facts, and close deals. Jerry, in your book, Soft Selling in a Hard World, you wrote that sales is a profession identified with the worst of its practitioners. On behalf of that group, I apologize for anybody who I did a poor sales presentation on years ago. Not in the best. It happens, it happens. Because they sell so well, the public doesn’t identify those that are at the top of the cultural heap. The politicians, the movie stars, the talk show hosts, the televangelists, and the business leaders, the world doesn’t view these people as salespeople, as outstanding salespeople. They’re rarely caught practicing the selling trade. The best of them are so good that people simply like their quote-unquote personalities, because people easily confuse skill with personality. When you study the best, you find that they make many mechanical selling moves right. Is this due to practice or coincidence? Natural talent or learned response? Only they know for sure how much is talent and how much is learned. The results are the same. They convince, move ideas, create change, and solve problems. We love them for it and we reward them with the best our culture offers. Fame, fortune, cool clothes, and a big house. Jerry, share with us about what great selling is and what bad selling looks like. Well, great selling is problem solving, pure and simple. You find the buyer’s real problem and working with the buyer to solve it, you work together. To do that, you have to ask intelligent questions and listen intently. Bad selling is vomiting your stuff, talking, pitching about your stuff, and seeing the whole transaction only from your own point of view. Successful selling is explaining well what you do from the client’s point of view. As in any activity, when someone is really good at what they do, it looks easy, even effortless. It’s transparent. And whether it’s running a podcast or playing tennis or skiing or selling, we all think, I can do that, until we try and learn how difficult it is. Oh, the one thing, Eric, that happened to us years ago is we were approached, Jerry, by the Scripps Radio Network. They produce HGTV, the travel channel, and they said, Clay, we’d like to have you produce a show that we’re going to air in various markets throughout the United States. Now I had heard a lot of Rush Limbaugh in my life, a lot of Glenn Beck, a lot of the big names. And I have been a production person. I ran an entertainment company, so I’ve done a lot of audio production. And I realized going into it how hard it was going to be because I’ve been up close to it. But I can’t tell you how many people have listened to our podcast and have told me that they tried to produce a daily podcast for about four days in a row. And they ran out of things to think about or talk about because they weren’t aware of the level of preparation needed. And so I think it’s really hard when you don’t know. And that’s what I love about your book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. Everybody needs to own a copy of it because you break down the science of how to sit down with the prospect and build rapport. And it’s very specific about what questions to ask. You break down how to listen intently. Then you explain how to find their problems, how to find their needs, then you teach how to solve the problems, how to support it by facts. The book is so linear and it breaks it down where I think the world looks at people who are great at sales and says, that’s probably natural. Natural talent. But it’s not natural, it’s a system. And Jerry, we work with hundreds of business owners all over this great country and we often find that many of them seem scared of making sales calls. What would you say to somebody out there listening right now who is an entrepreneur or who wants to be, who’s afraid of picking up the phone and making sales calls? Well, I have told them often when I sit down with management, I say, look, you have a right to be scared because poor selling skills down the line are a message to your market. It’s your message to the market and it is a waste of your money and you trash the market as you go. No business and no person likes rejection. The real problem is that all sales people, and I stress all, I include owners and managers here can see the upside of every possible transaction. This could mean $10,000 to my company. And they also sense the downside, no sale, wasted time, expense, and they don’t have the skills they need to control the downside and wait the transaction in their favor. Most of the time, they don’t even know such skills exist. And they often confuse personal magnetism with selling skills than a signed contract with being liked. Neither of those is true. What is true is that buyers would buy from a donkey if he could solve their problem. Chuck, that’s why I’ve done so well. People are buying from the donkey. Yeah, we’ll use that word. That’s a good word to use. Not the other one. Chuck, only I can self-deprecate myself. That’s you deprecating on me. That’s just mean, isn’t it? In your mind, Jerry, why does it seem like so many business owners are scared of rejection when it comes to sales? They fear the word no so much. Why? Because the real process is unknown to them. They’re walking into a situation thinking, I have a good product, but they don’t know one thing about the client personally and very little about the client’s business. So what would you say to a business owner, I see this all the time, they want to delegate their sales to an employee without actually using the script themselves first. They want to delegate the sales process to an employee when they personally have not used the system and or created a system that they wanted the owner wants to delegate their sales to an employee without them actually first creating and using the proven systems. What would you say? Well, to be not to be cute, but you know, I’ve run up against this quite often. I just say, look, you’re an idiot because if you own the major sports team, you wouldn’t put a player on the field just because you liked him or her, you’d insist on training and practice and lots of it. Managing salespeople is one of the most difficult aspects of running a business. I mean, I’ve been in business since I was 17 years old. I’m now 83, so you can count it up. Partly because salespeople take their cue from management, and many managers are not themselves trained. We’ve often trained sales people where the managers would not come into the room with them, and so the sales people ended up knowing more about sales than the managers did, which caused conflicts in sales because the people are going, ìWhoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.î And the managers are going, ìThis is what we’re going to do.î The more years involved they are with their product or service, the shallower the presentation becomes. The senior salesperson is often the worst person to teach others down the line. They’re often product oriented, make a few new calls, and sell to their old connections so they don’t like being told they don’t know what they’re doing. Business has changed now, and businesses that keep on selling the same way will eventually fall behind. You know, Jerry, in Soft Selling in a Hard World, you wrote a statement that blew my mind the first time I read it and I just kept reading it again and again. It says, there are only three ways to make exceptional money. To work in a place nobody wants to be, that’s one. To work in a place where nobody wants to be. That’s one, if you’re writing this down Thrive Nation. To work in a place where nobody wants to be. Two, to perform work nobody else wants to do. Or three, to do work that nobody else can do. So as we’re kind of thinking about that, Chup, I DJed hell gigs at the Holiday Inn Select, Jerry. I was a disc jockey. Seven days a week at the Holiday Inn Select for impersonators. So one, I was doing work in a place no one wanted to do it. Two, I was doing work that nobody else wanted to do because no one else wanted to be a DJ seven nights a week for impersonators who pretended to be Neil Diamond and Michael Jackson. And then three, I did work that nobody else could do because who knows how to host four shows in a row that are exactly the same, saying exactly the same jokes and pretending like you care while bringing the heat. Every single time, Jerry, people would pour in and I’d say, folks, welcome to the incredible holiday in Select. You guys are in for a treat. We’ve got Neil Diamond in the flesh. And everyone’s going, whoo. And I had to tee it up every time. I was like his Ed McMahon. I mean, so it’s so true. That is such a true statement. So I ask you, Thrive Nation, how are you going to get rich? Now you have to perform work that no one else wants to do, to perform work no one else can do, or to work in a place nobody else wants to be. Jerry, talk to us about the importance of facing the reality that these are the only three ways to get rich, unless you’re a unicorn example. Yes, or a drug dealer, or a liquor distributor or something. I’m going to write that down. Hey, yeah. These are the financial conditions we all cope with daily. This book is about dealing with the second and third ways of doing what no one else wants to do and what no one else can do. As you have said, people are scared of selling and many don’t have the skills to close deals. Learning to sell well allows you to bravely meet both of those conditions where you both want to and can do. Jerry, I love when you write in your book, you say, this book is about mechanics. I’ll preach it. It is designed from the street up tactics, not strategy. You won’t find any magic here. There is none. There’s no underlying motivation or belief. Here’s my favorite part. It says, it isn’t about something larger than yourself. You don’t have to believe in it to make it pay. You don’t even have to believe in yourself. You just have to use mechanics. Jerry, I want to pile on there, Chuck, because when I was selling commercial real estate, I didn’t care about commercial real estate. I would say the vast majority of the business ventures that I’m involved in right now are in industries and things that I am 100% dispassionate about. What is great selling really just about mastering the mechanics of sales? Well, done well. Selling is a profession, and learning a profession isn’t something that happens naturally or in a vacuum. It takes an awareness of errors and learning from those errors and correcting the errors, and in doing so, you eventually learn the profession. Persuasion as a profession is no different. It requires attention, troubleshooting, and practice. Jerry, I think that it seems so simple. You’re almost like, is that it? Is that it? No, but listen, it’s not, Thrive Nation, it’s not a one-time event, it’s a process. And so, Chuck, we have our sales meetings every single week at Thrive, every Tuesday, Jerry, because of you and your book, Jerry, you caused this problem. We train our team every single week, and in that meeting, we record the calls, and we play back the calls of actual sales presentations. We watch actual videos. Yeah, and while reading the script at the same time. And while the actual salespeople, Jerry, are in the room. So the salespeople actually get to watch themselves physically presenting on video and on audio every single week. And we do it every week. Jerry, for somebody out there that wants to do sales training like one time, why does it require ongoing training? Can you share that? Why does sales require ongoing practice? For the same reason that football players have to practice every Saturday and several times during the week in order to stay sharp, there are only so many responses that are available to the buyer, both in role plays and in reality. And when you hear them enough times, you go, I know what to do with this. So it takes a surprise out of the transaction for the seller. And you just get better and better. And I have to say, having your sales meeting once a week and doing role plays, I did that with, I owned a brokerage in Telluride, Colorado for 30 years and I role played my people every Monday morning at 7.30, much to everybody’s pleasure and we control 30% of the total market, two of us. So it’s one of those things where you go, when this comes to this, this is what you do, this is what you do. You run down, you go for the long pass, or you go for the short out, or whatever. Practice and all of that is a very serious and rewarding activity for the business owner. Jerry, can you explain to the listeners why you believe that soft sales is a learned skill? Why do you believe that? Well Because it doesn’t come naturally to us for 30 years. We taught a course in unnatural acts and For because the stuff doesn’t it’s just not a natural response. It is a learned response so for the soft sell, one has to put away the ego and let the buyer do the work. Well, believe it or not, it is very difficult for people to allow the buyer to do the work. We live in a culture that tells us we sellers are the center of the universe and to sell well, one has to allow and encourage the buyer to be the center of his or her own universe. Salespeople should talk more than 40% of the time. The buyer should talk 60% of the time. Great salespeople are all above average listeners. When we taught people to do shortlist presentations in front of committees and buying groups and We taught them how to give a mission statement, open with a probe, and then sit back and watch the action, rather than talk and talk and talk and do slide after slide and get into slide death. We teach this. Basically, we did a course in civilized conversation, which is to allow those people to do the work. I love it. I love it. I totally believe in the rule of conversational generosity. Let the prospect, let the buyer talk the majority of the time. Now Jerry, there’s another knowledge bomb from your book that I highlighted and underlined multiple times. And it read, if you have a world-class idea and you want to give it away for the good of humanity, you will have to sell the concept. And if you can’t sell it, you’ll be stuck with your idea, poorer for your brilliance and generosity. It seems unfair, but even freebies must be delivered with a certain salesmanship or the receiver does not perceive the true value of the gift. Jerry, why do so many people push back on the idea of learning how to sell effectively and resort to saying dumb things like, this product is so good it will sell itself. Well because they love this illusion, it is a cultural thing in my estimation, it is maybe 2% of the time it’s true that something will sell itself. But if your stuff sells itself and that’s not really selling, it is order taking. We all love the idea of the financial miracle, winning the lottery or unexpected inheritance from a rich aunt, and we’re all looking for the magic bullet, whether it’s weight loss or closing deals. Those are myths too, and they’re fun, but selling is a skill. There are no shortcuts to getting good at it, and no quick fixes. It may not be the fund you’re looking for, but the profession is very lucrative. The highest paid people in our culture are sales people. I agree with that. I agree with that. I think that there are many, many people out there that want to go into the marketplace and they want to just state, my product is the best, therefore it’s going to sell itself. And Jerry, in your book you write puffery is hot air. Webster’s definition, Webster’s dictionary defines it as flattery, publicity, exaggerated commendation, especially for promotional purposes. In selling it is claims that are unproven as stated. Typically puffery words and phrases are we’re number one, we’re the best in our business, save big money, a lot, high profits, and the fastest, etc. Can you explain for our listeners the profound difference between attempting to sell using puffery versus attempting to sell using representation, benefits, and facts? Well, in a downscale market, we buy puffery all the time, but I happen to be in the executive sales training business, and so we were teaching people to sell at the very highest levels, which of course also works at the lower levels. The less sophisticated the buyer, the more likely they are to buy Puffery. But buyers view Puffery as lies. They may not be intentional, but the buyers don’t believe them. First they make all salespeople sound the same, so everybody in your business then sounds the same. And when you get killed on a price negotiation, you have no defense. And second, they set up conflicts with your buyer. I want to ask you this, Jerry. This is not about the sales process, but it’s about you, the sales wizard. How long did it take you to write that book, Self-Selling in a Hard World, which is the Bible of sales? That thing is amazing. How long did it take you to read that or to write that thing? That thing is awesome. Well, probably around six months. It’s a funny story. We don’t have time to do it here. Someday when we’re sitting over drinks, I’ll tell you the funny story about my… Coming to you tomorrow. But it was one of those things. I wrote it as part of a software program I was developing at the time because I had my own bit-rich scheme about how to build a playbook on a computer. We were developing that in the very early days, and that book was just part of a package of teaching people how to sell using computers. It was really an ancillary project to this larger idea, which the larger idea failed, but the book was residual out of that, and it’s now sold about, I don’t know, 80,000 or so. It’s been on the market for 30, we figured out, 32 years or something, it’s been on the market. It’s been back with us a long time. It’s kind of one of those books there that I run into a lot of high-level salespeople that have read the book. Oh yeah. But it’s not a book that everybody… If you’re listening to this podcast, you should own the book. But if you’re working for a company and you’re selling burritos and you have no curiosity about how sales works, you should read the book, but you probably won’t because it would require a lot of work and thinking. But that book is awesome. Soft selling in a hard world. Jerry, I want to go back now to asking you some of these questions about specifically the closing move. Can you share with us what the closing move looks like to you? Sure. Actually, the closing move is the last move of the seven selling moves that is explored in depth in the book. And in fact, most of the course that we teach or used to teach had to do with covering the 7 selling move, it took 3 days. It just encompasses this entire idea of how to do persuasion from the buyer’s point of view. In selling, this move is called the close. This is the move that scares everybody to death. And it’s not just you, it is where people go, my God, what do I do now? In selling lore, this is the scariest move. However, this seventh move is the simplest move at all, but only if you have set up your whole meeting from your first words to solve the buyer’s problem. The actual words to close can be as simple as, well, how do you see us working together to solve this problem, or where do you think we should go from here, or something along those lines, and let the buyer do the work. Now we often get a comment when we teach this, well, they never said yes. Well, they were never required to say yes. It was all assumed that they would say yes, and if they answered this question, where would you like to go from here? You don’t need yes, no. It just doesn’t come to that. You know, with our wedding photography company and then with real estate, people ask me, they would look up Fears and Clark online. And by the way, if you’re out there at Thrive Nation, take the challenge, type in Fears, F-E-A-R-S, Clark, and then Kanbar. Maurice Kanbar there, Jerry, is the guy who invented Sky Vodka. And after selling Sky Vodka for $600 million, he purchased one-third of downtown Tulsa. And he asked me to list and market his properties for him. And people would ask me all the time, Clay, when you’re signing all those leases, what did you say to close the deal? How’d you do it? I said, well, I won. I’m using my Jerry Vass moves here. So I’m never going to say, well, do you want to go ahead and lease the space? I’d say, well, how much space do you need after you’ve looked at it? There you go. 12,000 square feet or 10? I’m sorry I stepped on your line, but that’s what I was looking for. I would say that, and then I would say now, okay, 12 or 10, okay, 12. Okay, and then when would you like to move in ideally? The 1st or the 15th? Okay, great. And we need a security deposit here. Do you want to do debit card or credit card? Okay. You want to sign right here? And then I would walk in to the office every time, and Braxton was there, and Bueno was there, and Tanya was there, and our team was there. And every time they’d go, did you get the deal? And I’d say, uh, guys, this deal was kind of tough. And so they could only pay with a credit card! And I would just get a deal every time. I would close every deal. I’m not kidding. I went, Jerry, in 2007, when I ran my company, DJ Connection, as a result of your book, Soft Selling in a hard world. I went the entire year We booked 4,000 weddings and of all the appointments we set I only had one person say no the entire year whoa one Shannon and Clark you still remember. Oh, yeah He shut me down Jerry. He said everyone in town’s using you so I decided to use somebody else Go ahead No, it was that move works now Jerry you write in your book that trickery in clothing is like trickery anywhere else. It’s short-lived. What do you mean by this? I mean, people teach, and I won’t drop names, but you know who they are. They say, well, there’s the puppy dog clothes, and there’s this kind of clothes, and there’s this reverse clothes, and there’s… and I’m going, no, that’s bullish, I’m sorry. That is not right because it takes away from the buyer’s attention. The buyer hates that kind of stuff because they know all of these tricks. And so because they know the tricks, the tricks fall flat and it just turns the seller into this shuck and jive guy instead of being somebody that you would want to do business so go well if you’ll shuck and jive me here in this transaction what what’s he hold for me down line when we’re in a serious business so that that’s why trickery doesn’t work very well and if you are in low in low low street sales, pots and pans and that sort of thing, perhaps you can get away with it. But if you’re going to be a legitimate professional salesperson, don’t use trickery. I love the phrase shuck and jive. Chuck, I’m going to begin using shuck and jive and shenanigans as words on the show more often. I agree. Hold me accountable. Why have I not said shuck and jive for a long time? You’re practicing shenanigans and you need to cut it out. Jerry has a better master of the English language than I have. That’s the whole issue I have here. Now, Jerry, I want to brag on Paul Hood, who’s on the show today. Paul and his company, hoodcpas.com, if you’re checking it out. By the way, we’re number three right now on the iTunes charts. No puffery there, Jerry. In the business section of the iTunes charts. We’re number three out of 530,000 podcasts, according to the Wall Street Journal in all categories. I’m talking comedy, sports, I’m talking about comedy, sports, business. We are number 26 as of the time of the recording of today’s podcast. So Paul’s been a sponsor the entire time. And Paul, over there at Hood CPAs, if somebody comes in and they meet with you and they do a consultation, you have multiple packages that the customer can choose from. Can you kind of explain, not necessarily all the specifics, but about the idea of having multiple packages and just letting the customer choose the options when you go for the clothes? You bet, Clay. And one of the reasons we did that, it kind of ties in with Jerry’s book, is Law of Clarity, where he says if you can’t explain your product to a 10-year-old, then you don’t know your product very well. You’re not a very good salesman. And so what we have is we basically try to break it down into three decisions and also so that they – it’s not a decision between yes and no, it’s a decision between which of the three do they want. And they go from a very basic comprehensive where we’re just doing some consulting type work and meeting with them once a month to the next maybe if it’s a business we’re doing accounting plus all the consulting, the third one would be if we’re doing payroll and accounting and consulting. But it breaks it down to where, all right, Mr. Potential Client, which of these three do you want? Which best fits your needs? We’re doing textbook, the soft-selling close. That’s right. Now, Chup, I want to teach Jerry a word here on this next question. Jerry, you’ve brought us back to shuck and jive and shenanigans. So I’m going to give you a word. I’m a huge New England Patriots fan, and the word I would like to teach you today is wicked awesome. Wicked. Wicked awesome. And that’s one word. And if you, if you, anything is great in Boston, it’s wicked awesome. It’s not hyphenated. It’s just wicked awesome. So Jerry, I would like for you to break down your wicked awesome bonus move on page 119 of soft selling in a hard world. You write about this wicked awesome important? Well, it’s wicked awesome important because many, if not most salespeople, have several things to sell. And after the buyer’s first agreement, because you’re going to be closing incrementally, and after the first agreement, the salesperson now has a proven performer in the buyer and must move on to the second and third sale and so on. Some businesses can’t even survive without cross-sells. Successful cross-selling cuts across the cost of sales and increases profits. You run into it very often when you buy something and you say you want an extended warranty with that or fries with that burger, you need to add on accessories for that car, well, that’s where the real profit comes. And so add-on sales really is the profit center for many of these businesses and a way to survival for them. You know, best buy. The cost, though, always starts with a probe, too, by the way. Always starts with a question. And so you can just continue on. I remember I was trained early on and I was selling mutual funds in one of my many careers and I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know a damn thing about mutual funds. I didn’t know anything about that business but I was taught how to sell it and I went out and I just kept selling until I ran out of things to sell. I finally had to shrug my shoulders and say, ìWell, thatís it for me. Iím done. I donít have anything else left.î So cross-selling can be pretty high adventure, particularly on high-end stuff like high-end real estate. Iím talking business buildings and that sort of thing, because I taught that for 30 years. making a million and a half, two million, three million dollars per sale, they practiced all the time. When they practiced, it was serious, man, because there was serious money involved and these were serious, bright, educated people. They were wonderful to teach. Teach. Now, this is something I want to hammer home on here, because, Chuck, this great selling doesn’t, as Jerry has mentioned in his book and then on today’s podcast, great salespeople don’t even look like they’re selling, Paul. It’s happening. I’ll never forget this, Jerry. I called the book a cruise with Karen Wheelock. If you’re out there and you know Karen Wheelock, say that Clay Clark is bragging on her, because she was good. If you are Karen Wheelock, Clay Clark is bragging on you. Oh, you’re the best Karen Wheelock. So I went to book a cruise, you know, and Karen says well great yeah, and I said how much are the cruises and Karen said to me this is the first cruise I went on I insisted on being the cheapest price possible and I had a Small boat got motion sickness the entire time So the second time I call and I said Karen how much do you charge? How much would it be? And she says Clay Do you let me ask you? What are you looking to do here? What’s the big occasion? And I tell her and she’s, oh, oh, so you’re gonna surprise her? Oh, really, wow. So let me ask you this, what are some of her favorite activities? Next thing you know, she’s got the probing questions going on. Next thing you know, Jerry, she booked an appointment. She got me to commit, not to buying something, but commit to the appointment within 72 hours, kind of within that window of time when I’m still interested. I met with her and she just continued asking me, well if you’re going to be here, don’t you want at least have like a balcony? Don’t you want to get this, you know, room service? Or what about tickets to that? Have you thought about a catamaran tour? And Jerry, somehow that $1,000 cruise, I feel like that $1,000 per person cruise turned out to be about $5,000 per person, but it was wicked awesome! It was really good. So the cross sell, I mean that is, whoo! And one thing, Jerry, that you’ve talked about is during your years working with thousands of salespeople, you’ve noticed that salespeople will instantly freeze up and seem to almost have kind of like a panic attack. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. It’s a salesperson has almost like an anxiety, immediate panic attack. shuts off as soon as a buyer inserts any objections whatsoever. Why is it that most salespeople need to learn to overcome objections? Well, quite frankly, if you can figure out what the problem is in the objection, you’re about halfway to an answer just on that part without doing anything. So when you hear an objection, the first thing you have to do is figure out what the real objection is. English is a very complex language, and why you think you heard and what the buyer really is saying can be quite different. So the first move is to ask a question. Something simple as, why is that? Or, help me understand why you say that, or what is going on here, etc. We’re now assuming salespeople have playbooks, so they will have practice the answer to this objection. But it takes practice, and you’re on the money having people practice, particularly in front of recording devices, cameras, and so on, because people cannot simply believe how bad they are until they see themselves on camera. So true. It’s just humiliating. I mean, I watch myself on camera and I just hang my head and cry. Now Jerry, you’ve written much about how salespeople can truly make a fortune if they understand that the profits are in solving the problems. I repeat, Chuck, the prophets are in solving the problems. Chuck, I’m not sure if I’m communicating. Maybe my mic is cutting out. You say the problems are… I think the problems are in solving problems. Ah. Chuck, do you get what I’m saying? The prophets. Let me try it in Spanish. El profito. El profito. El profito. In solving el problemo. Right. So, all right. So can you talk to us about what you mean by that? Sure. When we circle back to the top of our talk today, selling is problem solving. When selling to executives, there are really seven business problems that seem to be universal, which we discovered in learning from our students. They’re outlined in detail in my other book, Self-Selling to Executives, and they pop up over and over again. They are to acquire and manage capital, acquire and manage people, find and fill markets, meet and exceed the competition, improve quality and lower costs of production, maintain sufficient and predictable cash flow, maintain control and predictable overhead. When you’re selling into this stuff at the business level, life goes pretty well. People are not going to argue with you. They’ll say, look, we’re here to help you pick one, cut your overhead, or meet or exceed the competition, or find and fill a new market, or acquire and manage your people or your finances. So when you hit the business level for upscale clients, thatís where the money is. And really selling becomes consulting at that point, where you really are genuinely bringing value, true value to your client. I want to make sure that the listeners get a specific example of this, okay? So Jerry, if somebody out there listens to our podcast and they reach out to us for business coaching, here are just some of the problems that we can solve. I’ll just kind of list them out. Paul, you can chime in if there’s something I’m missing out on. Hey, I’ve got a quote here. It’s a business guru. If you’ve got a problem, you all solve it. Check out the moves. Well, my DJ revolves it. Thank you for quoting Vanilla Ice, the early 90s rapper. Business guru. Jerry, are you a big fan of Vanilla Ice? Were you a big fan of the early 90s rapper Vanilla Ice? Yes, uh-huh. Okay. Nice. There he is. So this is the thing, though. People come and say, what do you guys do? Well, we do all the search engine. So what’s the problem we’re solving? How do you get to the top of Google? So we’re getting you to the top of Google. We help you make a workflow. What problem does that solve? It helps you create time freedom. Paul, sales scripting. What problem does it help for you when our organization helps you with sales scripting? How does that help you, Paul? Well, it helps by creating a duplicatable system that can be scaled so that it’s not all dependent upon the top salesperson, me. Videography. What problem does that solve, Eric, for our listeners out there? Yeah, we’re oftentimes educating the customer on who we are, what we sell, and we’re showing them happy previous clients in testimonial videos as well. A lot of our clients can’t afford a videographer. They can’t do it. So we do the videography, the photography, the web development, the sales scripting, but we have to think about it in terms of the buyer. What are the problems we’re solving for you? And the problem for you, the average buyer, is you have a small business and you don’t have the ability to, you don’t have the money to hire a full-time videographer and a full-time photographer and a full-time web developer and a consultant to make it all happen. And so for $1,700 a month, month to month, for less money than it costs to hire a $10 per hour employee, you get all that stuff. And so that’s, that’s the, but I think Jerry, a lot of us, we can become so experts of what we’re, we can become such an expert and a guru of our industry that we can’t explain it to anybody. And that’s why I love the chapter of your book where you talk about the importance of positive self-talk and really sharing with yourself on an ongoing basis this positive, intentional self-talk and coaching yourself up. So when you head into the presentation, you’re saying, you know, I can do this. I’ve got it. I’ve prepared. I already know what I’m doing. Jerry, can you talk to us about the importance of being intentional about what you say to yourself as a salesperson? Yes. Yes. Because all of us, I mean, I have never met anybody who sold who didn’t have fear at some level. programs to sell our services, and I knew exactly what I was going to do and how to control it because I had studied it and written a couple of books about it and all of that, but even then, I mean, it’s pretty easy to get tense in those things when it goes out of control, when suddenly the answer to a question ends up over in left field someplace, you’re looking at it and going, what the hell do I do now? So it’s easy for us to talk ourselves out of selling when all we can see is the stress of it. Preparation, knowing exactly where you’re going and where you’re taking the buyer can change that. There are many more problems than problem solvers. So it’s kind of incumbent on the salesperson to keep an eye on the problem. What is the problem? You could continue to go, ìWhat is the problem?î And if you know what the problems are when you walk in, I mean, I would open with those. I would go into the boardrooms of big firms and my opening shot, I just take a look around the room and say, �Hey there, my name is Jerry Hess, and when your people walk in to sell your services, they don�t know what they�re doing.� So they have one rec right after another, often three recs before they get to the end of the first sentence. They go, �Whoa, because you can prove it. There it is. And they know it. Somewhere in their heart, they know that I am telling them the truth. Let’s take the accounting business. 90% of new businesses fail within three years. That would be my opening shot. 90% of businesses fail within three years. So right away, it gets the attention of everybody in the room, and you can prove it. And it’s provable and it’s researchable and it’s all there and it scales down or up depending on your perspective. It scales up to that 10% is remaining but it’s like half fail within the first year and there’s some long-term ratio goes like that. So and more fail within the second year, but by the third year, there’s only 10% left. And it’s pretty easy, once you’re aware of it, it’s pretty easy to watch it happen in real time, and somewhere in your heart of hearts, you know it’s true. So when you have a reputation as a problem solver, the opportunities just naturally flow your way. It becomes, it isn’t effortless, but it’s certainly at a greatly reduced effort. Salespeople and managers worry a lot about losing clients. I’ll tell you, when you solve a client’s problem, you can’t get rid of them. I mean, they stick to you like glue. This is so true. If you’re out there, there’s one gentleman that I met here about two months ago, Paul, at a conference. And he said to me, he says, I am a, this guy was in Florida, okay, in Florida. I won’t give any more details, I’ll just say he’s in Florida and he said, what I do is I’m a social media marketer, Paul. And I said, that’s cool. So what kind of problems do you solve for your ideal and likely buyers? What kind of problems do you solve, you know? And he says, well, what I do is I generate leads. And then I said, do you? That was my question. Do you? Is it provable? And he said, well, yeah. So it’s like, how does that work? He said, well, you pay up front for the first three months. You got to pay for the first three months. And it was a huge fee, Jerry. It was like $6,000 or something. And I said, OK, and then what happens? He goes, well, then if you want to cancel, you can after like the third month because it’s only like a thousand a month after the first three months, the big upfront fee. And the guy, I said, well, could you show me an example of maybe a client you’ve ever worked with where they get leads, maybe just one? And he’s like, well, Paul, there’s kind of too many to name, you know? I mean, it’s got a lot of them really. He’s fishing around and I wasn’t trying to, I was trying to help the guy. And then he pulls me aside at our workshop and he goes, I gotta be honest with you. I’ve never actually done this for people before. And I said, well, dude, that move doesn’t work. What you should say is, hey, I’m a social media marketer, I believe in my product, and you’d be my first client, and so I’m gonna do your first month for free, and then if you’re happy, then I’ll charge you this much per month, but you have to be direct and honest, you gotta use facts, but you also have to get in front of the decision maker, or you’re not gonna have a conversation anyway So the decision maker Paul if someone’s trying to go to hood CPAs, they go to hood CPAs comm they listen to our podcast And they show up at your office the chances of getting to you Unless they have an appointment are pretty pretty slim probably none. Yeah, virtually none because you are a decision maker Therefore you’ve it you set up systems in your life and processes to make yourself unreachable. So Jerry wrote in his book here, he said, Jerry, you write, in your book, the decision maker is often as elusive as true love. Can you explain this, Jerry, why the decision makers like Paul are always so elusive? Because they hate salespeople. Because salespeople waste their time. Our view is that you should be able to go in, make a complicated presentation, close the deal, and be gone at the executive level in 15 minutes. That means that everything is quantified, it is provable, there it is, you have a lead, you got a story. The problem here is that salespeople spend a lot of time talking into a receptive ear, which often has no decision-making responsibility. It’s because salespeople often prefer to meet someone at a lower level who’s more interested in the features of what you sell, and salespeople are often intimidated by executives who are interested only in benefits. What is in this for me, for my business? That’s all they’re interested in. And so that would then dictate that you would walk in and say, my business is to increase your bottom line, your net profits by 2% annually. That’s what we do. Well we can discuss that, you know, and because we’re talking the executive language. So people don’t understand that executives are not interested particularly in features. That’s for the people down the line, the kind of computer or the app that they’re using or some relationship that they have with them. That’s not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about the wrong stuff. Once you know what your product or service does for buyers and how you impact their company, you are way less likely to be intimidated or willing to waste time with someone who can’t say yes. It is a question. How are decisions like this when you’re talking to anybody in the firm? I mean, you are talking to the receptionist or you’re talking to the janitor. You ask them questions. No decisions like this are made inside this firm. I had a really good person today that asked me that, Jerry, a very skilled person. And for our Christmas party, it’s going to be $55 a head this year for the party. Every year, Jerry, it always is going up. Inflation, you know, it’s always going up there. This year it’s $55 a head. We have a staff all in between Z and I. There’ll probably be 400, getting closer to 500 people there this year. There’s a lot of people. And if you take four or 500 times 55, that’s a large number. And so a person asked me today, they said, how are decisions made for you guys, for your holiday party within Thrive? How do you do that? And I said, well, my wife decides the budget for the party. That’s what my wife does. She decides that. And so you gotta talk to her. And I think it’s so important, because if you would have been pitching to me, I don’t care how good the pitch is, even if I would have loved it, Jerry, I don’t have the budget authority within our organization. We decided that 18 years ago that my wife would make all final decisions on that holiday party, because I always want to swag it out and you know, spend money on things we shouldn’t be buying. And Vanessa is very good with the budget, and so it’s such a wise question. Ask people, who is the decision maker? How are decisions often made? Jerry, that is so important. Well, if you ask them who the decision maker is, they’re going to say, that’s me. That’s me. And so you have to come you have to come in a side door on that. How are decisions made? My view is and asking questions in probes, you start every one of them with how? I love it. Every one. And once you’ve mastered how, you can move on to some other things like maybe what and who. How is so good. It’s so good. Okay? So anytime you ask somebody, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to correct you, but this is what I do. Yeah. When you, when you, how are decisions made inside the company, you’re going to get a different answer from who is the decision maker. Well, I’ll say this. I’ll say this. I’m not going to argue with the sales wizard. I want to make sure we get this. The reason why we’re doing this podcast and this next question I have for you, Jerry, ties into this is once you’ve read your book, right? Three times, okay? Once I’ve read the book three times, once you’ve read your own book, Jerry, 400 times, you have to make a playbook then and you have to write down the specific questions because you just pointed out you would prefer to ask how, which is a great question. And the thing is off the cuff is a bad way to go. The pros prepare. They got to have a playbook. So you and I are having a conversation here, but you’re going to, after you’ve read that book and you’ve outlined and you’ve taken notes, you have to make an actual playbook because you and I both know the devil is in the details. Can you explain what it means for salespeople to truly make a sales playbook? Right. Well, it’s on a basic simple theory that if you can’t write it, you can’t do it. Self-selling is an action plan, and writing comes first, then practice on the street. The playbook is a working document. It changes over time as your business, your products, your services, your competition all change right in front of your eyes. After each call, make notes of what didn’t work and what you would change and schedule regular reviews of your playbook for review and upgrading because life is a continuous upgrade path here. It becomes an archive of the best of what you do. It’s also an excellent teaching tool if you’re called on to train new hires. We have found that it’s not priceless, but it is very pricey in the sense that it keeps you from making as many bad moves in a live presentation. Oh, it’s so good when you take the time to do this. Thrive Nation, take the time to make a sales book. Now, Jerry, why do you think that most people never do take the time to make their sales playbook? None of our listeners, but other people on other planets, other parallel universes, other countries, not our country, other planetary systems, they will listen to a podcast like this and then they won’t actually make the sales playbook. What’s going on, Jerry? Why won’t people ever take the time out to make the playbooks? Well, they don’t understand, this is my assessment, they don’t understand the importance of the act of the creation and design stage. Actually what happens is people learn a great deal about their own business in the act of putting down the words and what they think they say. And so what you think you say the words and do the words over and over and over on the script and then one day they change right in front of your eyes because you go, �Oh, I got it.� So that’s what a playbook does. It allows you to get it and when building it, you’re going to eliminate puffery and develop proof statements and quantify your benefits and find the unique benefits that you sell. Design a mission statement for both your firm and the upcoming call. You’re going to develop each of the seven selling modes, which we’ve only touched on briefly here, as explained in the book. That is those seven selling those. It’s really the central theme of our three day, you know, hard selling course, because we end up developing the selling book if we ever did in class, and then sent him home to do homework. And there was two or three hours of homework every night in order to work on the playbook. So it’s kind of a pain to do, it is time consuming, and it will tax your brain because you have to shift your thinking over to how does the buyer think about this? We know what we think about it, how do they think about it? And you will eventually develop a return on investment for the buyer of your services or your products delivered. So the ROI at the higher end of selling, when you’re selling larger ticket stuff, the return on investment becomes a very critical thing. We can say, we can say, look, you’re going to give me a dollar and I’m going to give you $10 back within 90 days. Well, I mean that takes away, that takes care of a whole lot of selling problems right there and you can prove, if you can prove that, which we could in our case, we could, you say, you know, it becomes. I want to, these final two questions, I am very, very, very passionate, about this next question because I falsely believed, Jerry, for a decade previous to knowing you, from age 18 to about age 20, I guess it was age 17 to age 27, age 26, somewhere in that time frame, I believed that sales was about motivation. So I would send my team to sales conferences all the time. And I would go to these motivational conferences. Now let me tell you the kinds of things they would teach. And when I took notes, Jerry, I’m a note taker. These are the kinds of things they would write down. They would say, everyone stand up right now and say right now, if I can conceive it, I can achieve it. And they bounce the beach ball. The music’s playing. And they’re saying, everybody, everyone’s yelling. They’ll have you stand up on a chair and say, I can’t sell. And they would talk to you about feeling it, and they would talk about aligning your vision, Chup, with your goals, and they would talk about the power of discovering the infinite knowledge that you could find by tapping into the universal knowledge. They would never call it God, but it became almost like a religion, Jerry. There’s all this motivation. And I went to one conference, and I met these people, and I thought, why are all of the jackasses here? And then I thought to myself, why am I here? And then I realized I also was a jackass and I was going to the Jackass Festival and I kind of liked it for the first four or five times because it was a jackass festival. But over time I realized all of those people were always looking for the new get rich quick move, their companies weren’t working, and things were going to hell because none of them could sell well. So if I’m out there saying, okay, I’ve been to all those conferences. I’ve been to all those woo woo things. I’ve walked on hot calls. I’ve watched all the motivational, Jerry, you’ve seen it, all the videos. I’ve done trust falls with my team. I’ve gone to ropes courses, hot calls. I’d like to get your thoughts on how salespeople can can overcome their fears and the best way to train your team? Well, it sounds to me like you have much of this ball of wax well under control, but it reminds me of the thing, the question about the violin player asks, ìHow do I get to Carnegie Hall?î And the answer is practice, practice, practice. And the sales are the same way, and it is not a glorious motivational-driven craft anymore. You can be a motivated football player, and it doesnít keep you from getting your head knocked off out there. I feel the same way. If you know how to defend yourself with knowledge, then you can defend yourself in every circumstance that you run into, except earthquake and bombing, but you’re never afraid. I was terrified for years, and I’ve been selling for 150 years. It doesn’t exist well in the face of extensive preparation. It just doesn’t. And the way you work your people, and I think it’s the way you’re working them, which is you find a buddy and you role play every presentation. You don’t wait for a perfect presentation. You just start using the skills and perfect them as you go along because it is a lifetime skill. It isn’t something you’re going to do for a year and then leave. If you go for a year and leave and you know your business, you’re going to make yourself $100,000 or $150,000 and nothing makes you feel quite as good as having a nice, fat bank account. There’s no time like the present to begin to do that so do it now and I absolutely agree with the motivational ideas because I think people do need motivation and particularly people who work alone, they get bummed, they get disappointed and they get disappointed greatly in sales because they don’t have a skill to close deals that are walking in their door every single day and those people turn down and walk out. I owned a real estate brokerage in the mountains and I trained my people. People would come in and say, ìWell, we want to see whatís for sale.î I had to train my people to say, ìCome back to my office and sit down here and talk to me about that.î The first question from our side was, ìWhat would you like the real estate to do for you? And that then began to greatly narrow the inventory about what you were going to talk about. Right. And you just went along that whole line and you qualified, qualified, qualified until finally it narrowed it down to where you had, I got two or three properties that we could look at that’ll do the way you want. You didn’t guess. You didn’t guess. You asked those questions. It’s so powerful. Yeah. Well, this is out of my experience. I’ve had to have trades and some of them worked and some of them didn’t. I mean, I actually am a man known for his failures more than his successes. Well, I think your biggest failure is agreeing to be on our podcast. That just shows a lack of judgment there, but thank you so much for making one more poor decision. I agree. I agree. All right, now… This has been miserable. Okay, well, Jerry, I have a final question here for you. You’ve literally worked with thousands of salespeople all over the world. Why do you believe that most people just try to make things up on the fly as opposed to implementing a proven path? I think a good part of it is laziness. I mean, there are two things. These are harsh words, but it has to do with laziness because it’s work and with a big W and it’s time consuming and people often do not even know that there is a proven path other than whatever the senior sales people told him who gave the new boy everything that he knew, which really wasn’t very much on how to make a sale happen. The guy’s been doing it for 30 years and so he is wired. He’s the number one guy in the company and he is wired to accounts that he has been courting for 20 years, and so he confuses people when they say, let’s watch him work. And he goes out and he says, hey, Bob, I’m here to pick up our order for this month or for this year, or I’m here to move you over to that other place. And so when do you want to get started? Well, because the trust is already built, it looks really easy. It’s very deceptive. Many people do not understand there’s an underlying structure to successful human communication and persuasion, and working without a structure or a plan is a design for failure. In this profession, there’s no magic bullet in this profession or any other one that you can think of or will run into in your lifetime? I think what you just said is so powerful. There’s no magic bullet. There’s a proven system. It works. It’s called soft selling in a hard world. Paul, I wanted to see, and Jerry, if you, if Paul no longer asks political gotcha questions, he no longer asks religious questions, he no longer paints our guests into a corner as one of our proud show sponsors. But he is a real entrepreneur with thousands of real customers. He has real employees. Paul, do you have a final question for the Wizard of Sales, Mr. Jerry Vest? Well, yeah. I apologize if this is a selfish question, but I would just like from the sales guru out there, Jerry, do you have any advice for me? Because like I say, I’m in the wisdom business. And I read a long time ago, I can’t remember, look, I read it out, that if you sell somebody, you break rapport, but if you educate them, you build rapport. But then I’ve got to balance that side of things, the hard sell versus being, not creating too much of a wisdom-based or, you know, like you said, vomiting my product or my wisdom or my knowledge all over them. What kind of advice could you give to me for that middle ground that I’ve got to educate them somewhat in that 40% that I speak, but I don’t want to vomit all over them like you said earlier? Well, it sounds to me like you’re doing it right. There’s always a balance that has to be achieved, and there’s a balance between advice and persuasion and knowledge and experience and wisdom. I mean, there’s some kind of a balance, and I don’t know what that balance is, but I do know that it is there because what we just did here in this podcast is that I have gained doing this for most of my adult life because it takes all of it. It’s kind of the whole mcgilla, the whole package. So frankly, I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. I would do what I’m doing. If you’re successful doing it, I do not believe if you can afford to give away a new car with every sale and you want to do that, for God’s sake, do it. But if you can’t afford that, you’re going to have to figure out something else. And so it’s one of those things where you go, I don’t like to try to change people from what they’re doing now if they’re successful now. I work with people who are less than successful than they should be. Given their talent, their education, their preparation, their time and rank, their education in the market, when they’re still losing, then they can use this information to start cleaning up their act and getting successful again. Most people have been successful at least once, but they wandered off, they forgot where the center of the universe was, where the center of the universe is communication with buyers and potential buyers. They forgot that and they started doing other things. I mean, I’ve done it. I had nine man years in a software program because I lost contact with reality, actually. I lost contact with reality. I was going on this $10 million deal that I knew that it was going to be superb and I was going to be rich for life and be able to buy myself a good used car. So it was, but I was wrong. I was wrong. And because I wandered off from the basics. So I don’t think I’m the right guy to ask about what you should do differently. If you’re successful doing what you’re doing, for God’s sake, don’t change it. Right, thank you. Now, Jerry, I appreciate you so much for taking the time to be on today’s show. Where are you physically located? What state are you in? I am on the beach in North Florida. In North Florida? Yeah, in Northeast Florida, 40 miles south of Jacksonville. I’m looking at the beach and the ocean, and it is part of my success package, shall we say. That and my partner of 25 years, Iris Heron, who actually is a co-author of the second book I wrote, which is a soft-selling for executives. So anyway, it’s a very happy circumstance. Is Soft Selling in a Hard World an in print for the people that want to get a copy? I’ve been buying them off of Amazon. Is there a certain place you’d recommend all of our listeners to go to to get a copy of that book? No, Amazon is the place that the stuff is bought and so that works. Well Jerry, thank you so much for being on today’s podcast. If you see a pale male, the big white moose walking up and down the beach in Jacksonville, that’s me, because we’ve been to Jacksonville a few times. And I am the most pale man in the history of our planet. So just look away. I don’t want you to burn your corneas or anything. And when you see the, I like reflect light, don’t I, Chup? I mean, it’s truly Casper. Handsome. Right. What is the scream? Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it! That was Jerry Vass right here on the Thrive Time show on your podcast download. And now without any further ado, 3, 2, 1, Boom! This month we did over two times as much business as we did last year. We had 208% of our last year’s numbers in this month. My name is Tony Sabrinas and I’m owner of Complete Carpet. I’m Nathan Sabrinas. I’m owner. I just gather with her. She does a lot of our management and call leads and connecting with the customers, all her back-end advertising. I do pretty much all the service, connecting directly with the customer. We started working with Thrive in, I think our first meeting was the end of October, so really November was our first full month of working with Thrive team here. Just increased in customers, we’ve just been really busy, we’re definitely learning how to manage this growth and to continue to move forward to expand our business. One of the big things I’ve seen personally is that we’ve been doing this for 20 years and I thought I knew how to do things and I thought that I was just like this was the best that I could do. And Thrive has shown that there are some best practice ways and other avenues that you can get things accomplished without having, without running into the same brick wall over and over. They say, well look, here’s this door, here’s this other opportunity, here’s another way to accomplish the same thing. And those tools have helped free up one, tremendous amounts of time to where I’m now focusing on the business and not just always working in the business, but also to be able to stay connected with our customers, to be able to give them a little bit better experience, to bring in Google leads, to bring in connections to where all of our regular advertising we already had. We haven’t changed some of the main bases of our advertising. It’s just now become effective and it’s working, where before it was just kind of hit and miss of what we could accomplish. And now we’ve doubled this month’s revenue compared to last February. And we really haven’t changed a lot, except we made everything effective. We made everything work. We stayed on top of our customers. And really, without the Thrive system, we hadn’t figured it out on our own yet. We needed somebody to kind of guide us, show us what it was that we didn’t know we didn’t know yet. And that way we were able to start connecting the dots through things that we thought just didn’t work. And we said, no, it actually didn’t work. Here’s the process to do it. And I said, I don’t know. I don’t know if it would work. And every week it’d come back and say, look, see, it’s working. And then that snowballs into motivation of saying, I can do this. I can accomplish things. And having that person there each week, having that meeting, that accountability, the ability to track what it is that you’re doing. Somebody else who cares at all about what’s going to happen in your business besides yourself has made the, completely turned our business around. For me personally, it feels like the win is knowing that we’re moving forward, we’re doing what needs to be done for the business, and that we have both someone that can guide us to do that, but also the accountability of it. Connecting with what she said, I think that having that accountability each week has been a huge thing for really connected, but in a specific goal oriented, when we started with Thrive, we were looking to do about a 50% growth. We thought, and our first meeting said, I don’t know, and I said, what’s your big thing? What’s a big push for you? And I told Marshall, I said, you know, I would love to see 50% growth. I really don’t think I can do it. I haven’t been able to do it yet. And we are four months later, and my goal right now, each month, is actually 60% growth. And this month, we did over two times as much business as we did last year. We had 208% of our last year’s numbers in this month. And so, to me, that’s one of our biggest wins, is the fact that we’re exceeding, by leaps and bounds, what I originally started when we thought I thought I was setting a really audacious goal of saying, you know what, we’ll increase by 50% I had a 12-month window of saying, in 12 months from now I hope that we’ve increased by 50% We’re four months in, I’ve increased by double I’ve increased by 208% and it’s just to me that makes all of this work worth it. I would absolutely. I think that our time here is extremely valuable and productive and we’re continuing to move in the direction that we want to go. And I completely agree with that. I think that every business needs to have somebody behind them that gives them a second pair of eyes on the things that they’ve been doing because you may think you’re a rock star and you’re nailing it, and you may be, but you don’t realize that there is more growth potential or better ways to become more efficient. And on that side of it, I’ve been able to accomplish so much more in the last three or four months using the same schedule I was doing before. I’ve actually got more scheduled time with my family. I’m focusing in on things that matter in my life outside of just business, and that helps to drive me and push me towards, so I think everybody should, at some point, take advantage of some offering that Thrive has, whether it be a conference, whether it be a radio podcast that’s their online school, or getting a one-on-one coaching which has helped us tremendously. I wanted to welcome you to our nation, yeah We took the very best books, and the very best minds And then we condensed them to 15 minute episodes, ooh Nathan, if you got any questions, oh I’m talking 24-7, all you do is call me, Nathan. Now it’s your time to thrive, yeah. Hi, I’m Ryan Wimpey. And I’m Rachel Wimpey, and the name of our business is Kip Talkin’ Today. Our business is a dog training business. We help people with behavioral issues and teach their dog how to listen. When I was learning to become a dog trainer, we didn’t learn anything about internet marketing or advertising or anything at all. Just dog training. And that’s what’s so great about working with Clay and his team because they do it all for us. So that we can focus on our passion and that’s training dogs. Clay and his team here, they’re so enthusiastic. Their energy is off the charts. Never a dull moment. Spirit drive. We’ve been working with Clay and his team for the last five months, two of which have been our biggest months ever. One, our biggest gross by 35%. Clay’s helped us make anything from brochures to stickers, new business cards, new logos, scripts for phones, scripts for e-mails, scripts for text messages, scripting for everything. How I would describe the weekly meetings with Clay and his team are awesome. They’re so effective. It’s worth every minute. Things get done. We’ll ask for things like different flyers, and they’re done before our hour is up. So it’s just awesome, extremely effective. If you don’t use Clay and his team, you’re probably going to be pulling your hair out or you’re going to spend half of your time trying to figure out the online marketing game and producing your own flyers and marketing materials, print materials, all the stuff like that. You’re really losing a lot as far as lost productivity and lost time. Not having a professional do it has a real sense of urgency and actually knows what they’re doing when you already have something that’s your core focus and you already know how to do it. You would also be missing out with all the time and financial freedom that you would have working with Clay and his team. We would recommend Clay and his team to other business owners because they need to be working on their business, not just trying to figure out the online game, which is complex and changing daily. So, no one has a marketing team, too. Most people don’t, and they can’t afford one, and their local web guy or local person that they know probably can’t do everything that a whole team and a whole floor of people can do in hours and not just weeks or months. There’s a definite sense of urgency with Clay and his team. I used to have to ride other web people, I mean really ride them to get stuff done, and stuff is done so fast here. There’s a real sense of urgency to get it done. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us, and getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place to the having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot, which, you know, we’ve been sitting here, we’ve been learning a lot, so the humor definitely helps, it breaks it up. But the content is awesome, off the charts, and it’s very interactive, you can raise your hand, it’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak. The wizard teaches, but the wizard interacts and he takes questions, so that’s awesome. If you’re not attending the conference, you’re missing about three quarters to half of your life. You’re definitely, it’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars. So you’re missing the thought process of someone that’s already started like nine profitable businesses. So not only is it a lot of good information but just getting in the thought process of Blake Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches, getting in that thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses, to me just that is priceless. That’s money. Well we’re definitely not getting upsold here. My wife and I have attended conferences where they upsold… where it was great information and then they upsold us like half the conference and I want to like bang my head into a wall and she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like, it’s good information but we’re like, oh my gosh, I want to strangle you, shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for. And that’s not here. There’s no upsells or anything, so that’s awesome. I hate that. Oh, it makes me angry. So, glad that’s not happening. So the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than business college I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business And I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years So what they’re teaching here is actually way Better than what I got at business school and I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. I would definitely recommend that people would check out the Thrive 15 conference. The information that you’re going to get is just very very beneficial and the mindset that you’re going to get that you’re going to leave with is just absolutely worth the price of a little bit of money and a few days worth of your time. The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. And we have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah. So, what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now. Okay. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both $1.3 billion companies. They both have 2,000 to 3,000 pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually nonexistent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has, by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, you know, asking our customers for reviews, and now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pest and Lawn company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay, so 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now our closing rate is about 85% and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process, and that has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah. So here’s a big one for you So last week alone our booking percentage was 91% We actually booked more deals and more new customers last year than we did the first five months or I’m sorry the first we booked More deals last week then we did the first five months of last year from before we worked with Thrive So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. It’s incredible, but the reason why we have that success by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews. That way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists. Everything gets done and it gets done right. It creates accountability. We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly, both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast, like Jared had mentioned, that has really, really contributed to our success. But that, like I said, the diligence and consistency in doing those and that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives. And also, you know, it’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut. The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. You know, they implemented those systems, they taught us those systems, they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely it’s been a grind this last year, but we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut, and if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline but that’s what it’s going to take in order to really succeed. So we just want to give a big shout out to Thrive. A big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Ladies and gentlemen, a lot of people talk about having success. A lot of people want to have success but you know there is a proven path to achieve success. And about four years ago, I had the opportunity to connect with somebody by the name of Dr. Mark Sherwood. My good friend Aaron Antus swore by the results of Dr. Sherwood. My good friend, Pastor Craig Hagan, swore by the results of Dr. Sherwood. And we had a chance to team up. And it’s been an honor to team up with his practice and to help him grow his medical practice. And if you’re out there today and you want to grow your business. On today’s show, we’re going to talk about growing your business and what happens when you diligently implement a proven plan. Here to talk about it is Dr. Sherwood. Welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? I’m doing well, Clay. Thanks for having me. It has been an honor, hasn’t it? What a ride and what a journey it’s been. Now, without getting into the specific financial numbers, you and I were talking offline, and I believe since you and I first talked on the phone to today, I believe you’re about seven times larger. Is that an accurate number? Am I getting that number wrong in some capacity? No, it’s at least seven, closer to eight. Yeah. And that’s so many people talk about growing their business by 2% or 5% or 12%. I want to give people some real facts here. We’re going to go here to Inc. I’m going to do a search right now on Google. I want everyone to do it with me, assume I’m making this up. Inc. Magazine reports that 96% of businesses fail. That’s according to Inc. Magazine. That’s not clayclark.com. 96%. Now, if you go to usdebtclock.com, which is, by the way, a great way to get depressed, if you go to usdebtclock.org, you’ll see that in America today, we only have 9 million, 9.3 million self-employed people and a country of 336 million. So just if even 10% of our country was self-employed, that would be 36 million self-employed people. But we only have 9 million self-employed people. So we’re talking about, it’s like less than 3% of our population is even self-employed to begin with. And so if less than 3% of our population is self-employed and 96% of businesses fail, by default, folks, you’ve got, you know, I mean, it’s a very, very small percentage chance of being successful by default. And so what I want to focus on is implementing a proven path and a proven system. So step number one, since you and I have connected, I didn’t teach this to you, but you do it. You diligently implement a plan. Can you talk about that? Because every week you and I, we connect every week. You know, in this case, there’s a plan that you do and I won’t get into all the details, but you do it every single week. You do it in the gym, you do it in your business. Talk about implementing a proven routine every day. Well, I think the end of the story of a routine is it produces predictability. And, and so I look at it like this, you know, good habits done consistently over time provides reliability, which gives you consistency, which gives you faithfulness, which gives you trust. Now trust is a big deal. Does that trust mean you trust yourself? I hope so. Does it trust mean that your customers or clientele trust you? They do because it’s predictable. The thing that people can’t stand, Clay, is unpredictability or chaos or just anxiety that’s driven in businesses. So we facilitate that culture from the top down to the bottom up. As you mentioned, every day I get up and I’m very routine. And so are you. We started working together. I remember you telling me you get up at three o’clock in the morning, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I probably wake up about an hour after you, boom, boom, boom. But it’s very predictable. People know where we are, what we’re going to do, what we’re about, and it creates an expectation. And I think that, among other things, has been a key element to experiencing the 800% growth we’ve had, which is, to me, it wasn’t that hard because it’s a process that works. Now, next question I want to ask you is focus on what you need to do, but then say no to the things you don’t need to do. Again, you have to say no to grow. So yes, you’re diligent and you’re consistent, but you’re also saying no to grow. And now there are billboards, there are magazines, there are yellow pages. Yes, there are still a few yellow pages. There are billboards, there’s magazines, there’s local cable TV. There are so many different ways that you could be marketing your business, but you’ve had to say no to grow. You’ve had to focus on, and you and your wife, you guys do books, you do documentaries, you do podcast interviews. You have a proven path, a proven trajectory that you’re on, but you do have to say no to grow. And sometimes you have to say no to good things in order to say yes to great things. Can you talk about the importance of saying no to grow? Yeah, specifically in our job, what we do, which is a wellness-based optimization of health practice, right? So the bottom line is I run everything through that filter. And our filter is does it bring healing to the person? Does it bring betterment to the person? And there’s all kinds of procedures, gizmos, gadgets, and whatnots out here that we can get involved in. But I always look at it from this standpoint. It’s got to run through that filter and it’s got to pass the test. Is it going to take us more time? Is it going to take us more labor? What’s the expense of it going to be originally? And what’s it going to take for us to recoup the expense if any. And so I run it through that filter every single time and if it doesn’t hash out, it may be a good thing, but it’s not a good thing for us. And people don’t understand that, but sometimes the greatest answer is no, because it’s a no that protects you from getting hurt. And you mentioned all the advertising mess out there. Clay, we’ve been approached by, as you know, many, many people to advertise in all kinds of markets. But if you don’t know what kind of person that you’re after, what is your target demographic, then you can’t just throw spitballs out there at the different sources because you will waste your time and money. And again, in that area, advertising, no to grow is critical. Now, the next area I want to focus on is having a linear workflow or a mapped out workflow or a written down process. So many business owners don’t have a written down process. So let me just give people an example. I’m going to go up to my website and then I’ll go to your website so people can see this. Very predictable. If people go to ThriveTimeShow.com, which by the way, folks, we have about five to ten people a day that often reach out looking for help growing their company. Now, I only take on 160 clients. That’s not a spiritual number. That’s not a reason I don’t do that for any spiritual reason. It’s just, I have found that with my team, I like to not have more than 160 clients so that I can meet all my clients. And those clients, they schedule a free consultation. And in order to do that, I have a kind of a call screener that sets up an appointment. They hop on the phone. They find out if they’re a good fit for a free consultation. Then my team books the free consultation for me. And because our average client is with us for six years or longer, if you do the math, we have an opening for a new client about every month or so. So if you look at TWA photos, this is one of my longtime clients based in Chicago, him, and we’re gonna hear his success story on part two of today’s show. He reached out, he filled out the form. A member of my team called Tim to see if he was a good fit. I then coached Tim on the first call, found out he’s a good fit, did my assessment, found out he’s a good fit, coached him through what we’re gonna do, laid out the proven plan. True story, and you’re gonna hear it on part two of today’s show. Tim went on to build a very, very successful company and he sold his business. Well, when he sold his business for a big time exit, guess what that did? That created an opening for another client. And so the process we have over and over and over is you go to ThrivedTimeshow.com, you can schedule a free consultation. My call screener vets that person to see if they’re a good fit. If they are a good fit, they do an onboarding with myself. Also, we have conference tickets. We do a conference every two months. And I’ve been doing this since 2005. So since 2005, I’ve been essentially doing the same process over and over and over. That’s why when you click on testimonials, you will literally see thousands of client success stories, just thousands, not 100, not 50, but thousands. I want to see if you can walk us through what does the workflow look like when people go to Sherwood.tv? What does that workflow look like? It’s fascinating. Again, you and I just kind of hit it off because we think the same way. So we have an opportunity to visit our website and we get hundreds of visitors every day and people can fill out a little questionnaire, it’s like a health assessment questionnaire, it’s free. And they get put through a series of funnel emails to sort of qualify what they want to do and it sort of kind of vets them at the outset, but if they want to work with us, just like yourself, we have a free webinar that they can go to. At that point, after attending the webinar, Clay, they then have the opportunity at that point to schedule a one-on-one assessment intake appointment with my wife and myself. At that appointment, we determine whether or not they’re a good fit. If they’re a good fit, we develop a plan for those and execute the same plan with the same full minutes. We’re personalized for their lives, much like you personalize that plan with the same general processes for that business. We personalize that plan of the same general processes for their life. Now when people work with me, with my business, and I’m not a medical business, I have a proven process and a proven system. And so when people go and they go to Thrivetimeshare.com and they look at the different success stories. We have companies like oxyfresh.com. We’ve helped them to grow now to 570 locations, 570. And I could go on just listing examples all day. We take companies like Shaw Homes, help them grow from 15 million to $150 million of revenue. And we just have so many success stories. It truly is epic. And that’s why the parent company’s called Make Your Life Epic. That is what we do, Make Your Life Epic. Dr. Sherwood, I would say what he does is very analogous to what we do for business, he does for your body. And so, again, I believe what he does, Dr. Sherwood, Sherwood.tv, what he does for your body is very analogous to what we do for business. We guide people down a proven path. And we actually tell people before they decide to become a client, what the path is. We tell people, this is what we’re gonna do to get you from where you are to where you wanna be. Now, I know a lot of people, I would say specifically, three people that I see on a weekly basis who have lost over 40 pounds since going to Sherwood.tv. So three people that I see on a weekly basis have lost over 40 pounds as a result of going to Sherwood.tv, learning about the protocols you offer and then following those. You tell people in advance what the protocol is gonna be. That’s very different from a lot of other medical programs that kind of hide the program or the protocol from the potential customer, from the potential patient. They hide it and they say, once you sign up, then we’ll teach you the protocol. Why are you so transparent with teaching people what your protocol is going to be before they become a patient? I think it produces trustworthiness, Clay, because a lot of times with what we do, transparency is key because my wife and I do it too. And I, again, I’m not knocking anybody else. I just know that what you just said is very true. It is analogous to you making someone’s company greater. I want to see their lives get greater. I want to optimize their health, give them the biological aging processes speed that’s optimal so they’re not aging too fast. And so we live it out, we do it, and then it’s no secret man, there are some processes that work. And I tell them, you know, if you’re willing to do this, this will work. And they see us doing it every day. We don’t hide our lives and we don’t shield them. We don’t do something, tell them to do something we’re not doing ourselves. So I think it’s exactly as you said. And to your point, we deal with a lot of entrepreneurs that have worked with you and do work with you. So the interesting overlap is cool. I can think of a couple of people that we’ve worked with that also have, are your clients in their business, and I’ve watched their businesses explode as their personal lives explode. So this energy there is just astounding to me as I think about that. Now, I want to walk people through this again here, folks. Again, we’re going to walk you through that. How is it that a doctor, a medical provider, a health facility is able to grow their revenue by eight times within a period of just a few years. How is that possible? When 96% of businesses are failing, one is you have to have a proven plan, two, you have to implement that plan each and every week, and three, you have to measure what you treasure. You just have to measure what you treasure. You have to track or it’s gonna slack. And that’s true with health, and it’s true with wealth. You have to track or it’s gonna slack and into any area of our lives you’re listening right now You talk about your faith your family your finance your fitness your friendship your fun any area where we are not Achieving in our optimal performance. It’s probably because we’re not measuring what we’re treasuring. It’s probably we’re not focusing on it and again I’m not attacking anybody out there. There’s somebody out there listening right now You are in phenomenal a physical shape and financially you’re not in shape. There’s somebody else out there listening. You’re in great financial shape, you’re in great physical shape, but your family’s not in great shape. Somebody else out there, you say you got your family, you got your faith, you got your fitness, you got your friendship, but you’re really, really in a bad spot in another area. So whatever we measure is what we treasure. Talk about that for a second because you have a way of helping your patients and your clients to measure what they treasure and to track, and I see people all the time coming into my office being excited. They’ve lost four pounds, they lost six pounds, they lost nine pounds, they lost 20. They lost 21 pounds, they lost 27 pounds, they lost 30, they lost 40. And you see people gaining confidence every week as they begin to take this massive goal they have and they start to see success day after day. Talk about measuring what you treasure. Yeah, one thing I forgot to add too in the process, we have quarterly events. I mean, and I didn’t, you know, have those things too, which are kind of cool. That’s kind of a culmination of stuff that people can celebrate. But when we talk about measurables, we talk about this all the time, you know, physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, financial, the five parts of the human experience, you know. And so, and I talk to them. I don’t get into heavy dealing with their debt, though, but I talk to them about eliminating debt and building equity. But I use that same terminology within health. I don’t want wellness debt, I want wellness equity. So in other words, if you can’t measure it, don’t do it. I never do a test unless I know what I’m asking, what questions I’m trying to get answered, and why I’m measuring it. I don’t do that. You mentioned weight loss. We have a unique way to measure that, not just about what the scale says, but I’m measuring their body composition, Clay. I’m measuring their percent body fat. I want to know how much muscle they’ve maintained or grown and how much fat they’ve been able to lose. I want to know their visceral fat level. I want to know their blood pressure. I want to know all their scores that I can find. We’ve even got tests that can score their biological aging processes and speeds and actualities. It quantifies that into measurable components. And so, we’re actually developing right now, and I haven’t got it rolled out yet, a quotient we’re going to call the FMI age. You know, it’s going to be a little massive thing that we’re going to put together. Because, you know, I think people are aging in a way that is probably too fast, you know, and I think we can probably age better. But to your point, I concur a thousand percent. If you can’t measure it and it’s not quantifiable, don’t do it because then it becomes a distraction. Now I want to tap into your wisdom on this, let you kind of show off what you do a little bit here. You know, one of my wonderful clients is called Koloff Fitness. Koloff Fitness and Charles Koloff started out doing personal training. He started out doing personal training. Now part two of today’s show, folks, you’re gonna hear his success story too. So you’re gonna hear the success story of TWA photos. You’re gonna hear the success story of Kola Fitness. He started out doing personal training. And then he decided, you know what? I wanna open up a gym. And then he said, you know what? I wanna open up a second gym. And that’s where we met him is as he was scaling the business. And so what he does when people wanna lose weight, I’ll tell you his secret. He tells them, here’s the deal. I need you to not eat wheat, no sweets, and no alcohol. And people are like, what? He’s like, no wheat, no sweets, no alcohol. We’ll see you three days a week working out. And he starts that process. He starts small, no wheat, no sweets, no alcohol, three days a week working out. And over time, they start to add maybe more detail to it, more supplementation, more detail, more, maybe more vigorousness to it. But they start off with no wheat, no sweets, no alcohol, three days a week working out. And then they start to build on that foundation. I want to get your, just for anybody out there that’s thinking about becoming a Surewood.tv patient or client, and they’re maybe concerned about what’s going to be required of them, what sort of life changes need to be made in the lives of people that are thinking about implementing the Surewood path? And I know there’s a lot of details, a lot of research that you do into each and every patient, but what are a couple of practical steps that every single one of your patients has to implement right away? Well, I appreciate, you know, I know Charles is one of the great people by the way, and I concur with what he said. That’s a great start for anybody, right? So at least take that. I think for us, our advice would be simply put, if it’s real food, eat it, don’t diet. If it’s an original package, it’s fine. If you can imagine it being in that package in the Garden of Eden, it’s fine. So I tell people typically to stay away, it’s going to sound crazy, anything the government subsidizes, don’t do it. That’s kind of what I tell them with food. And people can go, oh yeah, I get that, because the government subsidizes wheat, corn, soy, dairy, and that kind of mess, you know. So I tell them stay away from that. Then I tell them that every day I want you to try to get, you know, somewhere between about seven hours, give or take, is probably if you can get that much. And then I tell them every day that you don’t move is the day you’re dead. So I want them to move more, sit less. The days you don’t move are the day that you are going to be in the rigor mortis. So I make sure I tell them that. And then I want them to have the last little bit, speak life over self, man. Don’t speak death over self. Because many times people can walk themselves into a process of oblivion by talking themselves into death every day saying they can’t do it. Now for anybody out there that hasn’t worked with us, I mean you and I have had the opportunity to work together faithfully each and every week now for years. What would you say the impact has been on your business, working with us, you and I working together, for anybody out there who’s maybe thinking about working with us or becoming a client of ours? Well, without question, people need guidance today, Clay. It’s like a ship without a rudder. You represent the rudder. You can teach them how to drive, but you also shift that boat in the right direction. And I would recommend people do connect with you because you will do a good job. It will be consistent. It will be predictable. And if people just copy these habits, no matter what business you’re in, you can adapt them to the business, the habits work, and you will see a good return on an investment. And it will exponentially grow. And then the last thing I’ll say with that, when you connect with Clay Clark, you need to set your bar high. He will not let you set that bar low because he’s gonna stretch you, he’s gonna push you and he’s gonna get the, I’ll just say it like this, he will pull the potential out of you and get you believing again in a good way. So highly recommend it. I just, it’s working with you has been an honor. It’s a true win-win. For anybody out there that’s looking for health optimization, check it out at SureWood.tv. And again, what you do is so analogous for health to what we do for wealth. And so, for anybody out there, if you’re looking to optimize your health, check out SureWood.tv. Dr. SureWood, thank you so much. And again, for anybody out there that doesn’t know the story here, which should be everybody, you and I were just talking offline the other day, and you were saying, hey, Clay, I just wanted you to know, since you and I first connected, we’re up eight times. And I just thought, well, man, there’s so much discouragement in the world we live in. We need to document this and get this on camera. So thank you for keeping us updated, sir. And I can’t wait to have you on the show next week. You’re welcome. Thanks for having me as always. Take care. Bye bye. Well, Thrive Nation, we are the Thrive Time Show. What we do is we help businesses grow their business owners to grow their businesses. The purpose is to create time, freedom and financial freedom. And we’ve had a longtime client that we’ve worked with. And this is sort of like our exit interview because he’s actually exited the business. And so he’s at the other end of the rainbow, or he got to the top of the mountain, or he hit his big goal. And I’m honored to call him a friend and a long-time client. Tim Whaley, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? I’m doing outstanding, Clay. Thank you for having me on. Can you tell everybody, how did you first hear about what we do in terms of business coaching? I first heard of you through your podcast, actually. So I started listening, was very intrigued. Actually, you had built and sold businesses in the industry that I was in. So it seemed like a natural fit to inquire about coaching. Yeah. And, you know, once we connected and you did your, I’m not sure if it was an onboarding interview or it was more of a, you were going to determine whether or not we were a good fit. I think that was it. But once we did that, I was hooked and was really hoping that you would take me on as a client, which you did. Now, before I met you, I mean, you’d been in business for a long time and one would say you’re probably the dominant resource or one of the top providers in your industry before we even met. Could you tell the listeners how implementing the Dream 100 system impacted your business growth? Oh my gosh. So within just a few short years, it doubled our revenue, plain and simple. So Dream 100 was by far the secret sauce for our success and really the reason why I was able to exit my business ahead of schedule. So just a brilliant program, makes total sense. As a company, it’s one of the few marketing slash advertising outlets that you have total control over. It’s not like you’re on Facebook, which owns Facebook, or Google, which owns Google. But you own the system. You make it work, and great things happen. Now with the Dream 100, you have to identify the vendors that you want to refer you, or the prospects that you want to refer you. You have to identify the ideal and likely buyers that you want to refer you, and then you have to reach out to them consistently. And you guys have done a phenomenal job at doing that. What were a couple of the challenges of persistently reaching out to people to get them to refer you guys a business? Well, a couple of things. One, you just really have to find the right fit. You have to find the right employee or employees. Because really, when you’re going out there, you need somebody who’s obviously great at building relationships, and that’s a lot of different people. But what I found is you also just need a hunter-killer. So it’s not necessarily somebody who’s very personable and great with people, but somebody with those qualities, but also just has a, like I said, a hunter-killer, just wants to, has a drive to bring business in. And you find that person and they just make it happen. And we were fortunate enough to find a couple great employees who were just very good at that. And now that you have sold the business, you’re gonna stay on as an advisor to make sure that the brand is successful and that sort of thing. What does it feel like to be on the other side of the rainbow, or to be at the top of the mountain, or to be on the other side of selling a business that you started so many years ago? Well, Clay, it’s only been six weeks, so obviously some mixed feelings there. But if I had to put it into one word, I would have to say freedom. Okay. Yeah. So it feels pretty darn good. And my wife and I are very excited. And obviously we’re still, you know, we’re still helping the new ownership transition and whatnot. So there’s stuff we’re doing and stuff to be done. But overall it’s, you know, when you’ve been hitting it hard for 33 years and then all of a sudden you don’t have to, it feels pretty darn good, not gonna lie. Now, Robert Kiyosaki, the bestselling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I recently interviewed him. And he had me on his show. And it’s been kind of fun to connect with this guy who wrote the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series. And it’s just fun to connect with him. And he’s been talking borderline obsessively on his show recently about it’s not what people say, it’s what they do. You need to watch people do, not what they say. And I think a big thing about having a business coach or a personal trainer if you’re into fitness is if you’re into fitness, you need to have a nutritional plan. You need to have a workout plan. And then you need someone to hold you accountable. And if you’re a business owner, you need to have a business plan. You need to have weekly actions that you need to implement. And then you need to have some accountability. How has having a business consultant or a coach to guide you down the path, how has that impacted you? Tremendously. So there’s a running joke between my wife and I. I will often say I’m the most consistently inconsistent person you want to meet. Historically, I’ve been the guy who starts this, goes for a little while, and then, you know, I’m like a squirrel, right? I see the next great thing and I’ll go after that for a while. And so I’m an artist, right? I’m a photographer first and, you know, business guy second, I guess. So you have helped corral my artist brain and having, you know, the weekly accountability calls and the action plan has definitely helped me stay focused on what needs to be focused on. So yeah, it’s been life-changing, nothing short of life-changing. Now, I want to pull up something real quick and get your thoughts on this because you and I have worked together, I think for about three years or is it, how long did we work together there before you exited the business? Do you know? We started in 2019. So 2019, okay. So we’ve worked together for quite a while there. And so 2019, wow, so that’s almost five years, four and a half years or so. But if we do a search for carpet cleaning quotes, I’ve worked with one particular brand for 14 years, I think almost 15 now, and they have 271,000 Google reviews. So for 14 consecutive years, I’ve been talking to the same ownership about, you have to gather objective Google reviews from your ideal and likely buyers. You have to get reviews. After you clean the carpet, you have to gather video reviews and Google reviews. And we talk about it every week. And it’s just like bamboo. I keep coming back every week. I just you can’t kill it. I come back every week talking about the reviews. And in a world now where people go online to look stuff up, this has been a powerful tool for oxyfresh.com. It’s grown from a handful of locations and out of 500 plus locations. How has gathering objective Google reviews and video reviews impacted your sales process? Well, I feel like it’s a one-two punch, Clay. So Dream 100 and the reviews work hand in hand. So the majority of our business comes from the Dream 100, but that’s one referral source. So our couples will be referred by venues, but they wanna check us out. So they’re gonna go online and look for our reviews. So not only do you have to have a ton of reviews, but you have to have a ton of five-star reviews. And so the referrals plus the social proof on Google brings them in. Final questions I have for you, then I’ll be done harassing you here, is you’ve now have got all the systems, the scripts, the website, the ads that work, the Dream 100 system going. And so to give people some clarity, you now have a turnkey marketing system in place. I mean, you have a Dream 100 system that works, you now have an online advertising program that works, you now have a sales process that works. It’s all documented. It’s all systemized for the new owner. So what would you say for anybody out there that is maybe thinking about coming to one of our in-person workshops or scheduling a free 13-point assessment with myself or a member of our team? What would you say to somebody who’s kind of on the fence about maybe coming to a workshop or scheduling a free 13-point assessment? Get off this fence. Just get off the fence. Bottom line, you know, you’ve helped make my company sellable, right? So those systems is exactly what made our company attractive to the buyer. They were looking for a company that was highly successful that they could then take and scale. And our business qualified because of what we’ve done over the last five years. And so, yeah, I would never, I would not hesitate. I’ve told anybody who’s ever, you know, asked me about my coaching relationship with you and your organization, I said, I wouldn’t hesitate. Never in a million years. You have literally changed my life as a result of what you’ve taught me. You know, you’ve got to come to Tulsa one of these days here, so I know you guys are going to enjoy your retirement or whatever it is you’re doing, but at some point, if you ever get the bug and you ever start a new thing or you’re ever in the Tulsa area, I really want to see you guys. You have my cell phone number, we can talk whenever, but I just want to tell you, it’s been an honor working with you and it’s been so exciting to help you hit your goals, and I know you’ve worked 30 plus years to go on this dream vacation lifestyle that you’ve built. What would you say to anybody out there that has a business and they feel, by my final question for you, they feel overwhelmed by all the systems they have to build and they’re not at the top of the mountain, they haven’t sold the business yet, it isn’t systemized and all they see is perpetual chaos. What would you say to that person? Just take the next step, right? Every journey begins with the next step and that next step should definitely be contacting you guys Tim you just do that The rest will take care of itself. You make sure of that. So Tim, it’s an honor serving you again I appreciate you very much and don’t be a stranger there, sir. You got it. Thank you. Thank you. Bye Hey guys, Luke Erickson here with the Thrive Time Show. As you can see behind me, we’ve got all kinds of energy going on. People are starting to show up for the conference. It is hot in this place. We’ve got grill guns over here. We’ve got people playing the drums. We’ve got a fire breather. And man, people are so excited as they come in. Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the grill gun. Hi, I’m Bob Healy. I’m the inventor of the grill gun and the civvy gun. JT, do you know what time it is? Um, 410. It’s Tebow time in Tulsa, Roseland, baby. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 2-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 in the Thrive Time Show 2-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 2-Day Interactive Business Workshop is America’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshop. See the thousands of video testimonials from real people just like you who have 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 going to see thousands of people just like you who have been able to go from just surviving to thriving. Each and every day we’re going to add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? I don’t know what 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. Again, you just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the request tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it. And I am super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton. I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Jerusalem, Oklahoma. I suppose it’s Tulsa, Russia. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russia, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show and Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. Who? You! You’re going to 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 of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical. It’s actionable. And it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. 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 fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get 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 and 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 be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you 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 Kings Point in New York, octa non verba. Watch what a person does not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Keosak University 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 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 name of Jeremy Thorne 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 Direct TV 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 want 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. Not only that Clay, thank you but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. So 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, changing 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, I learned at the Academy at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say.