Clay Clark | Jason Jennings | NT Times Best-Selling Author | How to Create Systemized & Sustainable Growth In Your Business + ImplementingTurn-Key Systems & Processes + Join Tebow At Clay Clark’s Dec 5-6 Business Growth Workshop!

Audio Transcription

Man, if you have ever run a business without documented systems and processes, you are definitely not experiencing, or you’re really not living if you haven’t ever gone through that. And I have gone through that. Before we met with you, Clay, we were doing that exact thing. We had all these things in our head. We kind of knew what was going on, but there was always a problem. And once we got to where we started, like literally writing everything out, doing the checklist, making sure everybody knew how to do them, making sure that there’s processes for every single thing that we do from answering the phone to cleaning a window to pressure washing a house to installing holiday lights or cleaning out a gutter. Man, once we did it all that and then started utilizing those checklists in conjunction with training our employees and teaching them how their specific job was or is supposed to be done and they’re using those checklists and they’re understanding what the process is and they understand that, hey, this is what the whole system looks like and how you’re just one cog in this wheel and it’s super important. Man, when we did that, it was a game changer. It really, really, really increased revenue, increased efficiency, and it took a load off of my shoulders and my manager’s shoulders because we just weren’t running around anymore with our hair on fire. 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 multimillion million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use because they believe in you and they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show starring the former US Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zunder. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, now we’re here We should fly, started from the bottom And now we’re at the top, teaching you the systems To give what we got, Colton Dixon’s on the hoops I’ll break down the books, see if we get some wisdom And the good roots, as the father of five That’s why I’m alive, so if you see my wife in camps Please tell her hi, it’s the C-N-T Up on your radio, and now 3, 2, 1, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Ladies and gentlemen, we are interviewing one of my favorite authors and one of the most successful business and leadership authors on the planet. Jason Jennings began his career as a radio and television reporter and became the youngest radio station group owner in the country. Later, he founded Jennings McLaughlin and Company, a powerful consulting firm that really became one of the world’s largest media consulting businesses. His books have been seen on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list, the New York Times bestsellers list, USA Today bestsellers list. That’s like all the lists. He’s on all the lists. Mr. Jason Jennings, welcome on to the show, sir. How are you? Clay, it is great to be with you. And I’m doing really well because I’ve been doing a bit of snooping around. I just told your associate that I’ve done hundreds of radio shows and hundreds of podcasts. And these are the best questions I’ve ever seen in my life. I appreciate that. Now, I want to ask you this here. Where is home for you these days? Where do you live? So I’m originally from the Midwest and you have to know that I am really a Midwesterner at heart. But for the past 30 years, myself and the family have lived in a beautiful little bayside village called Tiburon. I’m actually looking out of my home office windows and I’m looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyline of San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay. Wow, well I’ll tell you what, we’re looking here out at the back of Camp Clark in Chicken Palace Studios in beautiful Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we have 17 acres, 40-something plus chickens. We have cats. I live behind a wall. It’s the Camp Clark and Chicken Palace experience, and I know that it’s a big tourism desire of your heart to come to Tulsa, and if you ever come, I’d love to give you a tour, my friend. I have actually been to Tulsa, and I know that Tulsa has more Art Deco architecture than any other American city and I’ve actually walked the streets and inspected the Art Deco architecture. Now a fun factoid for you about the Art Deco architecture is years ago a man by the name of Maurice Kanbar who lives in San Francisco Bayou who invented Sky Vodka bought one third of downtown Tulsa and he hired me to market all the property, 90% of which was Art Deco. So I walked the Phil Kade Tower, I walked all these buildings in downtown Tulsa, and they are truly a sight to behold, much like your book, Hit the Ground Running, which is absolutely a sight to behold. This book, Jason, was introduced to me by my partner, Jonathan Barnett. He’s the founder of Oxifresh, where we now have over 400 locations all around the country. And he said, Clay, I was at the conference and this guy was talking about you’ve got to read Hit the Ground Running. They’re teaching from the book. And so I just, like I do with every book I read, I’m reading the book, I’m highlighting, I’m taking notes, and I started realizing, man, this guy has done deep dive research, case studies. This book is so actionable. It’s so practical. Jason, where did you first get the inspiration to write Hit the Ground Running? Well, I’ll tell you what. I am not the brightest bulb on the string. I never have a muse on my shoulder. So all of my books, the subjects for all of my books, have come through carefully listening to other people. And so I generally do 60 to 80 speeches a year around the world. But what most people don’t know is that for every one of those speeches, I interview at least 10 executives with the company and I require an hour-long conversation with the CEO. And I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a good listener or if they can really tell that I am empathetic to what they’re doing and the challenges they face, but very often I’ll be five or ten minutes into a conversation with the CEO and they’ll say, hold on a second, let me get up and close my door. And they come back and then they spill the beans and they say, let me tell you how the cow weighed the cabbage. And I can’t because, you know, we don’t have a school or a university that trains CEOs. So most people end up in the position of CEO and they don’t have all the answers, but they know they’re expected to have all the answers. And so one day I started thinking, wouldn’t it be great to in research and study those CEOs who have created the greatest amount of economic value in their first three years on the job. And so then it becomes a huge research task. You know, you run the names of every one of the publicly traded companies in America and a lot of privately traded companies where financial information is available and you come up with a short list and then you get rid of the bad actors and the people have received, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in fines from the Security Exchange Commission because I don’t write about bad companies. And so we finally came up with this list of companies that many people will know. Staples, for example, JM Smucker, Goodrich, Humana Insurance, and these were the companies where the CEOs had created the greatest amount of economic value in their first three years in office. On average, they had doubled revenues in three years, tripled earnings per share, tripled EBITDA, and doubled profit margins. They were truly outstanding people. We went in, we gained access, which is always the very hardest thing to do, but eventually we always get our man or woman. We get inside and gain access. And then we spent hours asking questions. I mean, what did you do when you first became CEO? I mean, look at what you’ve achieved. What are the steps that allowed you to do this? And so for a typical book, including that book, I hit the ground running. We generate about 100,000 pages of interview transcripts. And then myself and my research team sit down the old-fashioned way with high-light markers and go through it. We’re looking for commonalities. What did all of these CEOs share in common? And then the end result is always a book. I just cannot overstate how valued I felt as a reader when I bought your book. Now, just to disclose, I bought your book at the time, I want to say it was about $30 or so, and a lot of times you read a book, I’m a voracious reader, you’ll get a book and you go through it and you go, okay, this guy quit doing research on chapter one. After chapter one, this guy kind of mailed it in here. And then, you know, and I’m a person who wants to complete every book, so I read it through. But like the last chapter or two, I’m going, just come on, get to a point. Your book is so action-packed with actionable points. And so I wanted to do was to have you kind of break down a few of the points and hit the ground running, specifically as we go into the rules. And you have rule number one in the book that says, don’t deceive yourself, you will reap what you sow. The case study of the J.M. Smucker Company story. Can you break that down for us? I can. So we had completed the financial information, we gained access to Tim and Richard Smucker, who at the time were the co-CEOs, and we were in an office that had originally been their father’s office. And I went to Sunday school as a kid, so I always knew, I mean, you’re going to reap what you sow. I mean, I knew that was from Galatians. I could even tell you it was from Galatians 6-7. But above the desk, there was this big sign, and I had missed part of Galatians. It said, Be not deceived, God is not mocked. So if somebody’s listening who is not religious, well, you could use the word good instead of God if you want. Be not deceived, good or God is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth, he shall also reap. And I asked them about it, and they told me, I’m sorry, it wasn’t their father, it was their grandfather who had that above his desk his entire life. And he said, this is why we exist as a company. They don’t lie. They don’t have people around them who lie. They all practice the golden rule of treating people like they would like to be treated themselves, unlike what you see in so many other companies where it’s all about the CEO, it’s all about the ego, it’s all about the shortcuts, it’s all about taking advantage of customers, taking advantage of suppliers. It just didn’t happen in any of these companies. And so that’s why I chose to begin that book with that quote from Galatians. One other notable quote I want to share with the listeners out there who are more of a… I’m a Judeo-Christian. My wife and I have five kids, all of which are currently Judeo-Christians. But for those of you out there who are more of a secular perspective, we have hundreds of thousands of listeners. I want to make sure I keep it fair and balanced. Napoleon Hill once wrote, he said, nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price. And it’s just, that’s a powerful teaching moment. And I’d like to, if I can, ask you about your literary career. You’ve paid the price. You have paid the price. What price have you paid to get your first book published? Because as I was researching you, I thought, Jason, I could do 10 shows just about the price that you paid to get to where you are. How have you paid the price? Yeah, the price was a huge one. And so you already mentioned the back story in your nice introduction. I was in the broadcasting business and the consulting business. Almost 20 years ago, at age 40, I basically had my midlife crisis. I was alone at home one day. I’m sitting in the family room on the sofa and I went to get up. Physically, I could get up, but I just plopped back down and I went, �Is that all there is?� I’m just going to keep buying radio stations and growing this consulting company and half the clients are the consulting. When you’re supporting hundreds of people on your staff, the color of go is green. If somebody shows up and they want to be your client, you need the money, so you take them. With some of our clients, I always felt like taking a bath at Lysol. I just knew that there had to be something more. I thought maybe I would become a second career seminarian. I was introduced to a man by the name of Dr. Timothy Lowe, who was head of the Pacific Theological Seminary, the Lutheran Seminary in Brooklyn, California. I made the point to go and see him, and I said, I really think I might like to sell everything and come back to seminary and become a second career seminarian. He said, that’s a big move. He said, we should spend some time talking about that. Over the next several months, it was Dr. Lowe who eventually told me, ìLook, I donít think you want to come to seminary. Iíd rather put you on a board of directors and have you write us checks.î He said, ìBut I have figured out your calling in life. You love business done well. You love leadership done well.î He said, ìI think your calling in life, your gospel, is to identify the greatest business leaders, I mean the greatest companies in the world, get inside and find out what they do.î He said, ìThatís what I think you need to write and talk about.î So I came home, sleepless night, first one in my life. I was laying in bed. God, if you’re out there, throw me a thunderbolt or something. I mean, send me in some direction. I didn’t get the thunderbolt, but I woke up in the morning and figured out I was going to get a book contract. Now Clay, I am somebody who’s always gone through life, a high achiever. I used to say, I regret it now. I used to tell everybody that worked for me, there are reasons and results. Don’t give me any reasons, just give me the results. I look back and at points in my life I must have been a holy terror. So it was time to get a book contract. Well I got rejected by 97 publishers one after the other. Oh, I’m glad to know I’m in good company here. But here’s what happened. With every rejection, I became more determined to get a great publishing company and have a great bestseller. You’re going to love this story. So finally one day I got an email from a man at HarperCollins, the publisher at the business imprint of HarperCollins. And he said, Dear Mr. Jennings, I’m not interested in you, I’m not interested in your idea, I’m not interested in your constituency, please don’t bother me again. And sometimes dramatic action is called for. I hit reply, and I went, Dear so-and-so, you are at S.A.N. And what you don’t know is that Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch are clients of mine, and they own your little publishing company, and the next time I’m with them I’m going to tell them what a jerk they have operating HarperCollins’ imprint. Within two minutes, what do you have to lose? Within two minutes, I get a reply. It said, Dear Mr. Jennings, you sure have chutzpah. If you’re ever in New York, I’ll give you ten minutes. I hit reply without even thinking. I said, I’ll be in your office tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. So I walked into his office the next day at nine o’clock, and I walked up to shake his hand, and he’s one of those New Yorkers, he’s very successful, but he’s one of those New Yorkers that doesn’t shake hands. And I said, oh, you don’t shake? I said, I’m from California, we don’t shake hands, we hug. I walked up and I gave him the biggest bro hug he had ever had in his life. I thought the guy was going to die. To this day, he’s still my publisher at Penguin Random House, but every time I see him, I say, stand up, it’s time for the hug. I finally got a book contract from him for a little bit of money. That was my first book. It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow. So now the real story that you’re going to love is the book was going to be debuting in a few weeks and I get a call from a friend of mine who’s the CEO of a media company in Los Angeles and he called me and his name is Craig and Craig said when’s the book coming out and I said in a couple of weeks. He said you remember last year he said I had some real challenges in my executive suite with my leadership team, and you came down and spent a day with us, and I said, yeah, great time. He said, remember, I didn’t have any budget, and you didn’t send me a bill. I said, well, that’s what friends are for. He said, well, it’s time for payback. He said, put together a little radio commercial for your new book, send it down, and we’re gonna give you a million dollars for the free advertising. Whoa! Clay, Clay, I was in Omaha, Nebraska on the day the book came out and the radio campaign debuted. The book shot to number one. It became the number one book in America. Not the number one business book, but the number one book in America. It really stayed there as long as the radio campaign ran. People were running into bookstores. They couldn’t even say the title. I mean, do you have the book? It’s not the fat that eats the skinny. It’s the skinny that eats the fat. I mean, they didn’t even have the title right. I mean, but so powerful was the advertising. Of course, what gives you permission to write your second book is the success of your first book and what gives you permission to write your third book is the success of your second book. Publishers are only interested in your success. That’s how the whole thing began, but there was a lot of rejection along the way. I think there’s somebody out there listening who you just spoke into their life in a profound way. There’s somebody out there who’s been getting a ton of rejection. I know I fought through that rejection. If you’re out there and you’re just feeling like, you’re feeling overwhelmed by the rejections, just understand that you can view them as learning opportunities and stepping stones and all of the great stories, all of the Jason Jennings of the world, they all have their character built as a result of being promoted through these problems. And Jason, you have really developed a thick skin throughout your career from what I can tell, which is what has allowed you to get in and interview the top leaders at companies like Staples. You have these Fortune 500 companies. You’re able to somehow get into the companies and reach these CEOs when nobody else can. Well, and let me tell you about that. It’s not that I have a thick skin. I’m the biggest softie you’ll ever meet in your life. I believe that to be fully functioning, compassionate human beings, we always have to allow our head to meet the heart. If I’m guilty of anything, sometimes I allow myself to be led more by my heart than anything else. However, I do know that, I don’t know where I heard this many years ago, but everybody else gives up. Everybody wants to write a book, most people give up. Everybody wants to be worth millions of dollars, I mean most people give up. Most people give up. And so, you know, I’m always going to be the last man standing. And I’m not going to tell you that it’s easy to gain access to these companies. It’s hard. And once I had a couple of big successful books, I thought getting access would be easier. It just got harder because they knew that somebody actually was going to read the book. It’s all the well-intended gatekeepers who are trying to keep you out. We just never give up. We’ll reach out to board members, we’ll reach out to big customers, we will threaten to run ads in newspapers and write about them with people who don’t want to be identified with us. I’ll do anything, but ultimately we get inside and within five minutes we know we love each other. And they spew, and they tell me everything. So rule number four in your book hit the ground running. You’re sitting down with the leaders at Staples, and you came up with this rule number four, which is find, keep, and grow the right people. Please share with us what this rule is all about. Okay. So at the end of the day, you only have one competitive advantage as an organization, any organization, and that is your culture. Because whatever you make, sell, produce, supply, someday somebody’s going to do it better, faster, cheaper. They can steal your advertising. They can steal your people. They can steal everything you’ve got. So the only thing any organization has of any value is culture, and that is built around people. And you know, most of the Gallup studies show that 76% of all employees in America today are not only not engaged, they’re actively disengaged from their jobs. So Ron Sargent, the CEO of Staples. Now, I just told you how hard it is to get into some companies. I called Staples, I said, Ron Sargent’s office, please. And the next thing you know, this guy’s picking up the phone saying, hello, this is Ron Sargent. And I said, you answer your own telephone?î He said, ìOf course, if Iím in the office.î He said, ìMost of my time Iím in the stores, but if Iím in the office, why wouldnít I answer my own phone?î Thatís how I struck up my relationship with him. It was all about the number one responsibility of the person in charge is to find, which is attract, which is to keep and to grow the right people. His rules are very, very simple. Always make sure you hire the right person. Never fill a spot with a body. Never do it because it’s going to blow up on you. Number two, promote from within. Number three, give people new challenges and move them around. Have a program to identify the superstars. Make everyone an owner. Constantly communicate with everybody everything or they’re going to think that nothing is happening. And you never want your people to think that nothing is happening and look like your customers and be as diverse as your customers. And those are his rules, Ron Sargent’s rules for people which ultimately allow you to build a culture. I want to ask you this. This is a way our organization is structured. We coach with a maximum of 160 clients at any given time. I would say the average revenue, Jason, is somewhere between a million and 20 million a year is our average client of revenue. And a lot of times people will say, I hired somebody, I’ve communicated with everybody, they’ve been on my team for about two years or three years, and they’ve kind of like been promoted to a level of incompetence, where they were really good as an assistant manager, let’s say, but as a manager they’re overwhelmed. They were a good person in this particular position, and they still have great character, they just are overwhelmed there. What would you say to the small business owners out there who have a team of 50 employees or less, and they’ve found a good person, they’ve been on the team for a long time, and they’ve accidentally promoted somebody to a level of incompetence? Well, what I can tell you is this. I think that everybody in the world has a great BS meter, which means everybody knows everything. So if the owner of the company is unhappy with the performance of a person, or thinks that they probably got promoted to a position they shouldn’t be in, there’s somebody else that knows that as well. And it’s that person. That person knows it. They are, nobody is that delusional. So if the boss thinks it, so does the person think it. And what it comes down to is it comes down to have one of those come-to-Jesus speeches saying, you know, John, you’ve been here three years, we put you in this spot. I’m not sure if you’re cutting it, but if I think that, you’re probably thinking the same thing, but you’re so good at other things, I don’t want to lose you. I mean, will you consider taking a step back? I mean, maybe we’ve got to search and find something else for you. It just comes down to what I referenced earlier, when the head meets the heart. So well said, Thrivers. I encourage you to listen to this podcast twice. Underline it. We have all the show notes. Every show is transcribed. That is such powerful language, Chuck. That is so many business owners struggle to have that conversation in the way that Jason just said that so artfully. Yeah. It really demystified that for a lot of people. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen or experienced in my past life with the Concrete Company of not having those conversations out of the anxiety or whatever. And when you just lay it out like Jason just did, it’s just a matter of fact. Here’s a problem, let’s fix it. It makes it a lot easier. Now Jason. It does. In fact, in my book, and I don’t want to go off script, but in my book, The Reinventors, the reinventers. There’s a chapter about communication and the big thing about communication is this. Companies, big companies, small companies, all-size companies, are spending more and more money, more money that’s ever been spent on communication. The problem is all the communication is top-down. Everybody is overwhelmed with so much communication from a company, the company they work for, they don’t even know how to deal with it. So we kind of turn it upside down in my book, The Reinventors, and we talk about bottoms-up communication. And that is the responsibility of every boss, to sit down with Mary or to sit down with Jack and say, you know, Mary, the reason I wanted to spend some time with you today is because I really think you’ve got some great talents and I really want to be a great leader for you, but I’m not going to be able to be a great leader for you unless I know a little bit more about you. So today what I want to talk about is you, your dreams, your hopes, your wants, your aspirations, what you ultimately want to achieve. And when you have that kind of a tell me conversation with people, you will then know how to lead and grow and develop people. Too many bosses, too many owners fail to take the time to have that conversation. That’s the first conversation that anybody should have with an employee. You know, the bottoms-up conversation, Shep, last Thursday in our office, John sits down with employees and goes over their goals. And several of the young ladies who work with us, mostly the ladies at this time, they had said, we have a staff of close to 100 something people between the different businesses. And the ladies were saying they wanted to get in great shape. And so we were able to kind of reorganize the schedules. They can go to workout classes together. And it’s a logistical thing. And I guarantee you, the people I’ve seen that have already started this program a few months ago, I’m not a fitness expert, nor am I trying to get into their personal business. But when you ask somebody, what are your goals, they say, well, apart from work or at work, my number one thing is I want to get in shape, and I’m struggling to find the time to do that. So by just reorganizing their schedule and blocking out time to go to a local gym and then actually paying for the gym, Chup, there’s a new enthusiasm with certain folks in the office. And it’s exciting to see that. I cannot hammer home the importance of that bottoms-up mentality more. It really, really does. It really does. And then what happens is, on an ongoing basis, I mean, then you have to be sufficiently interested for the follow-up. So, Mary, how’s it going in the gym? Are you getting stronger? Are you working core? What did you do today? It just shows an interest. I think that, Jason, that’s one of the things that we teach all of our clients is to understand that as you scale and begin to duplicate yourself, you have to have the mindset that management is mentorship. You can’t just expect people to have the same mindset as you, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about. Now, rule number seven from this book, Simplify Everything, it’s just there’s so many good things in this book. This is the Aladdin mill story, and it blew my mind at the time I read it. And as I was preparing to interview you again, I’m going through my book and I’m going, oh, this is blowing my mind again. Two mind exploding moments there. How is that even possible? What caused me, I mean, our marketing agency, it’s called Make Your Life Epic. It’s one of the largest, if not the largest, in Oklahoma. And at the time, I had these very complex systems. It was almost like you had to be able to decipher, maybe like hieroglyphics or something to understand the systems there, Jason. People had to work with me for two to three years to fully understand how to do their job. In your book, Rule Number Seven, it says, simplify everything. That set me off and helped me so much. Can you talk about what you mean when you say simplify everything. Yeah, and the back story to that is Mohawk Carpet, the Aladdin Mill story, one of their brands, and their CEO, Jeff Lorberbaum, based in Georgia, about an hour and a half outside of Atlanta. And it is an unbelievable company. It’s the world’s largest carpet and floor manufacturer. They’ll do about $10 billion this year, three billion in profit to the bottom line. Talk about a tough cookie to get to. I got as far as his assistant gave, and I could never, I mean it was just a cold shoulder, no interest, we’re not interested in talking to you. And so finally, I mean we tried a couple of members of the board of directors, and finally I went to his biggest customer, who spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year with him, and said, can you get him on our side, can you get him to agree to talk to me and tell him, and tell him I’m never gonna give up. So one day at six o’clock in the morning, I’m in my office at six o’clock in the morning on the West Coast, and the phone rings. This is Jeff LaBarone. What do you want? And I said, well, I wanna talk to you about a book. You’re an incredible business person. I wanna write to you about the book. He said, I got the message you’re never gonna give up. I said, I will never give up. He said, be in my office tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock. So I schedule a red-eye to Atlanta, get in a rental car, through like three hours of morning traffic to get to the location. I get there with like two or three minutes. I walk in, there was not much of a handshake, and he was all kind of put out by this. So he said, how long is this going to take? And I said, I don’t know, a couple hours, as long as you want to go. And how does that sound? And he said, well, that’s fine. And so I set up my tape recorders, and with redundancy for three, because you never want to lose anything wonderful. Real quick, quick, quick time out there. I want to dial into that real quick. I want to focus on that, because you just said you have three tape recorders. Yes. I’m the only person that I have ever met, now I’ve met another, who whenever I do speaking events, I will have my laptop with me in one bag. Another person has a laptop, and there’s another laptop that we pack. I travel with three laptops whenever I travel, which is why I never had AV problems when I did speaking events, because I actually brought my own backup AV gear as well. Can you please talk to me about the paranoia that you have on a daily basis that allows you to bring three tape recorders? And then we’ll go back to your story. I just love that, that’s awesome. All right, so, well, so let me just tell you this before I give the backstory and the three tape recorders. And so he said, how long is this gonna take? And I said, well, a couple hours, or as long as you wanna go. This is nine o’clock in the morning. At six o’clock in the evening, we were still there talking. And as I tell you, these people talk, they talk. It’s not that I’m a skilled questioner because my questions are very simple. Tell me about you, tell me your story, and tell me the story of the company. That’s it. All I really have to do is sit there and say, and then what happened? And then what happened next? And then, all right, and next? That’s all I have to say because I am so captivated. William Buckley once said that 99% of all people are interesting, and 1% of people who are not interesting are interesting because they’re not interesting. So let me ask you a question. How much is it worth for Jeff Laberbaum, who’s worth billions and billions of dollars, how much is it worth for me to get one day of his time? It’s worth a lot of money. It’s a lot of money. So I can’t afford. I remember having just my main recorder and a backup and an interview and I finished hours and the main recorder hadn’t worked if I hadn’t had the backup and that’s when I went to triple. And so I always travel with three voice recorders. Your level of preparation is inspiring. Whenever I’ve read your book, I just cannot stress to the listeners out there, if you’ve not read a Jason Jennings book, you’re going to spend $20 this month to chop at a gas station. Easily. You’re going to go into a gas station, the guy’s going to say, do you want anything extra with that? And you’re going to say, yeah, probably. A couple of things. Let me get this, let me get some of this, let me get some beef jerky, let me overpay for a Red Bull. Yeah, and no, no, no, no. This month, let’s have a month of abstinence. Let’s say no to $19 of random things you don’t need to buy. Let’s buy a Jason Jennings book, and you will see, maniacal in a good way, preparation at its best. It’s so good. And this concept, rule number seven, of simplifying everything, it freed me up to scale. Where previously, as I grew the business, my personal effort would have to increase. But your concept taught me that if you simplify, then you, although you can’t multiply your own personal effort, you can scale your company. Please deep dive into that. Oh, I’m going to in a moment, but I have to let you in on a secret. You just said something, and I’m sitting here with the broadest grin on my face ever. You have to know, for 34 years I’ve been in the gym six days a week, wherever I am. I’m in my high school graduation weight. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been at. I eat extraordinarily clean. And you know what I did today? I bought a beef jerky at a gas station. We both do that a lot here, too. And I got the jumbo size. Are you striving for ketosis? Is that your game plan right now? Ah, man. So anyway, Jeff Loberbaum is brilliant. And I said, what is the magic that’s allowed you to do this? And he said, look, we just make everything as simple as possible. He said we exist to make our customers’ lives easier. He’s not talking about people who put the carpet in their homes. He’s talking about the carpet stores that sell their floors and sell their carpet. We just have to ask ourselves how we can make our customers’ lives easier. Then we set about wringing out waste and inefficiency. It’s about knowing exactly where we want to go, but taking small steps to get there, and don’t try and stop things from happening. He said, every day I ask myself, how can we make this more simple? And this was a common thread that we have found in all of the companies I’ve written about for all of my books. They just work relentlessly to make it simple. There are a lot of people in companies who bring no value to the organization. They don’t sell anything, they don’t service anything, they don’t create anything, so what they have to do with their job function is make it appear to be very, very complicated because if their job appears to be very, very complicated, they think they can’t be replaced. And so you have to constantly root these people out of the organization who believe that making what they do is so complicated that nobody else can do it. I would like to share two notable quotables. One is by William Shakespeare and the other one is by me and I shouldn’t quote myself, Chep, so you can quote me. William Shakespeare, he said, is the soul of wit. AKA simplify and you can multiply. Now Chip, I always say at our conferences. Clay Clark on the other hand, he always says, complexity fails and simplicity scales. Yep, yep. So important that you simplify, simplify, because Jason, in the event that you try to scale something that’s not simplified, what’s gonna happen to the personal life of an owner of a company if they personally try to grow from two million a year of sales to twenty million dollars a year of sales and they haven’t simplified their systems and processes? Well, they’re not going to have a life. And then they will ultimately be destroyed. You know what, I have the Jason Jennings sound effect for encouraging you to simplify. You just got a simple… okay, so rule number eight, uh, Chep, I call this the Ocho. Oh yes, yes. This is my vast knowledge of multiple languages. Very good, very good. Okay, so rule number eight, be accountable. The Goodrich story. This, this, this story was so powerful. Can you, can you talk to us about being accountable and the Goodrich story? Rule number eight. Yeah, I can. Uh, the man’s name is Marshall Larson, and what, uh, who is the CEO who had created so much incredible value in the previous three years. What you need to know about him is he’s from a little small town. Let’s see, what is it, Enderlin. Enderlin, North Dakota or Enderlin, South Dakota. But because of his small state, he got nominated to go to West Point. He went to West Point. He served a very distinguished military career and left and got into business. So he carried a lot of that military career with him. And of course, what happens in the military is there is 100% accountability. So when he got to Goodrich, they had been a former tire manufacturer based in Ohio, they relocated their headquarters to North Carolina, and there were lots of aeronautical businesses. They’re not in the tire business at all anymore. more. So, his rules, he was a remarkable man to spend time with. He said, look, here’s what it’s all about. He said it’s about having a sense of personal responsibility and being accountable at all times for anything and everything that happens in the company. He said by doing that, that allows me to set the example and hold everyone else accountable at all times. He said there is no slack given here. He said once you have built your accountable team, you trust your team. And he said what you do is everyone has to have a crystal clear understanding of exactly what’s expected of them. Exactly. Not some idea of what they should be trying to get done, but they should have a crystal clear understanding of exactly what’s happened to them. And then he said forget vision statements. He said you have to have a destination and communicate it all the time. All the time. All the time. Non-stop. Non-stop. See, what happens at most companies, guys, is this. The leaders make a big pronouncement, they send out the memo, they hang up a couple of posters on the wall, and they just assume that everybody got it, everybody understood, and everybody’s going to live it. That doesn’t happen. It has to be communicated and lived all the time. But like you might expect from a military guy, he said, and you have to have an access, an axis of advance. And I was sitting there looking like I just fallen off the back of a turnip truck trying to figure out what axis of advance means. And but to a military guy it means, you know, you have to have accountability and you have all the steps to reach your destination. And everybody has to be accountable. I didn’t know where you were going to go with this answer, but I did know that it was going to come from a military perspective because of the case study. So I had a notable quotable prepared that I want to ask you here, kind of a sneak attack. Colin Powell, who many people know is the first African-American Secretary of State, very decorated military leader, he once wrote, being responsible sometimes means pissing people off. Can you talk to me about where the rubber meets the road? When someone knows what to do, they clearly know what to do, and they just passively, aggressively refuse to do it, how would you handle it, or how would you instruct our business owners to handle that type of situation? Well, I can tell you, more importantly, I think I can channel Marshall Larson here, and I can tell you how he would handle it. And he would say, John, we agreed that this was going to happen. You agreed that you were going to get this done. You have failed for whatever reason. What is your plan for correcting it and getting it back on track? Let’s discuss that, because other parts of the organization are counting on you to get this done and if you don’t get it done, it’s going to slow them down and adversely affect their performance. So let’s try to figure out what you’re going to do to correct it and know that it has to be corrected. And you don’t need to say any more because the implication is clear. You know Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE who grew the company by 4,000% during his tenure. He once wrote, he says, good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. He said relentlessly, which is what you were talking about earlier. You just have to talk about it until you’re just almost sick of it, don’t you? I mean, you have to obsess about over and over and over articulating the same thing to get it done. Over and over and over again. Rinse and repeat. Do you, as an author, do you have a mantra that you repeat over and over and over as you go from best-selling book number one, best-selling book number two, best-selling book number three? Do you have a mantra that keeps you, that you have kind of your own? Because you’re an author, so it’s weird because you’re self-employed, you lead a team, but you’re the head of the team. You’ve probably got a whole lot of pressure from other forces to compel you to write the next book, and you have to get yourself all fired up and articulate the vision to yourself and hold yourself accountable. How do you do it with yourself? I can tell you exactly what I do, and it happened when the first to admit that that book was all about me. I was so proud that I was going to have a book. I was so proud that I had a contract with a huge publisher. I was so proud of this. It was all about me, which is not a good place to be in your life. And finally, I had a revelation. This was the day before the manuscript went in, and it was, this is not about me. This book is going to be around a lot longer. This book has to be more about others than about my little world. So in every book that I work on, every piece of research I do, is coming from the place of how can I help somebody become better? better. Will this book fulfill the promise of the title of the book? I am driven and what allows me to keep my finger on the pulse is every day I get about a hundred emails from people who have read books and listened to speeches. Since day one, I respond to every single one of them. It might only be one or two sentences, but I don’t have an assistant write them for me. I write every one and I will tell you both that I there’s never been a morning that I don’t sit here because I’m Scandinavian heritage unfortunately my kidneys are close to my eyes. There’s never been a morning that I sit here answering these emails or I don’t tear up once or twice because when somebody sends you an email and says I’m a dry cleaner in Utah we were almost bankrupt. Today we have nine locations and it’s because of you and your book Less is More or you and your book Big X Small. I just sit here and get moist eyed. That couple wanted to travel to Chicago to a speech I was giving just for one minute to shake my hand. They didn’t care about attending the conference. They just wanted to shake my hand. It’s not so much a mantra as it’s just knowing the powerful responsibility that I have. That right there is Thrive Nation. That is a powerful question I would ask you rhetorically today. What is your big mission? What is your big goal? Why are you doing what you do? Rule number nine from Hit the Ground Running is the importance of cultivating a fierce sense of urgency. Cultivating a fierce sense of urgency. Mr. Jason, can you break that down for us? Well, I can’t. I mean, it’s basically, I suppose in some respects, biblically inspired. I’m also of a Judeo-Christian heritage and background. But I remember when Jesus told, challenge these people, follow me. And somebody said, well, you know, I’ve got to go home and bury my father. He said, let the dead bury the dead. If you’re coming, just come along now. Well, I’ve got to go back and take care of my family first. Come with me first.” And so urgency was important then, and urgency is important now. And there’s just no room for complacency in any company today. And so Keith Ratty comes to mind from Questar. He was just another fabulous character in the book. He said, look, you have to set out to win and get things done quickly and surround yourself with others who feel the same way. He said, nobody else can cut it. There’s no place for anybody else here. We’re all setting out to win, getting things done quickly, and surround yourself with others who feel the same way. He said, we have a no-spin policy on everything. We are focused and we get rid of businesses that we have no experience in, we root out any sense of entitlement or complacency and that entitlement and complacency creep is ripe in lots of companies. Then he said we do postmortems on everything that works and that doesn’t work, we ask dumb questions, we stay humble and he said then when you can no longer do those things, leave because you’ve lost your sense of urgency about what appears to be your life, in many different aspects. A sense of urgency about your diet. Yes. You say, this meal, this food that is presented to me as an option, this or this does not fall into my diet or my worldview, my game plan. So I want to just get off the rails for a second. I want to hit the exit ramp. And I want to ask you about your personal diet, because you have a sense of urgency about it. I’ve listened to enough interviews, probably way too many. I’ve probably creeped you way too many times online interviews. And anything I could read about you, it seems like you’re very intentional about your diet and what you’re putting into your body. You have that sense of urgency. Can you talk about what you allow into your body except for the occasional massive beef jerky stick that you ate today. Yes, yes, I will. Well, first you have to understand that growing up in America’s Midwest, by the age of 16, I weighed 245 pounds. Now, granted, I was playing football and I was 6’2″, but I was 245 pounds and I was fat. And I became an exchange student in France. Well, you can imagine, you know what every 16-year-old boy is thinking about? They’re thinking about 16-year-old girls. Well, French people are kind of petite and tiny. I got over there and I looked like an elephant on roller skates. And I just put myself on what was probably not healthy, but was a starvation diet. And I got down to 170 pounds during the length of time I was there. And I just became resolved that that would be where I would stay for the rest of my life. I mean, so I don’t think I’ve got any eating disorder, but over the years I have figured out what I need to do to stay there and stay at my top peak physical form. And a big part of this is being in the gym every single day, six days a week as well, and really working yourself out as hard as you possibly can. So my diet is essentially very simple. I guess you could say I don’t eat a lot. So I begin my day with one cup of decaffeinated coffee during my first hour of the day and I generally take two or three sips of that. I mean that’s it. The cup is full an hour later. And then about an hour after that, I like to go 12 hours before I’ve had food. So if I’m in bed by 9 o’clock in the evening, then at 9 o’clock I’m having a fruit and vegetable smoothie and it’s fruits and it is vegetables and a little tiny bit of kefir, that yogurt-based drink, and I will drink quite a bit of that. A couple of hours later, I’ll have some protein, generally a couple of eggs. Then if I’m going to have a half a sandwich in the middle of the day, it’ll be a lean turkey sandwich and I will take most of the bread off. And then in the evening, I’m going to have a piece of protein, a good piece of protein, it could be as good as a couple of small lamb chops, add a vegetable and a salad. And that’s it. And the only exception is, other than the beef jerky today, I have no idea how that even happened. Probably once a month I will allow myself to go to Woody’s Yogurt and have a scoop of ice cream with a little bit of chocolate sauce on top. That’s it. And everybody says, oh my God, you are so disciplined. It’s got nothing to do with discipline in my life. Going to the gym six days a week has nothing to do with discipline. My diet has nothing to do with discipline. Playing my viola has nothing to do with discipline. It has everything to do with a lack of discipline because I’m afraid if I stopped, I would never start again. It’s that simple. So you play the viola. I read that you were good at that. Are you very, very good? I mean, you played this for years? I don’t know, 12. So when I was a kid, I wanted to play a stringed instrument. And my father very simply said, no G.D. kid of mine is going to G.D. play a G.D. instrument. You’re playing football. You’re playing basketball. You’re running track. None of this tennis crap either, because that’s for sissies. And so I, from the earliest age, wanted to play a stringed instrument. And so 12 years ago, I went online, posted an ad that I was looking for a teacher, and several people applied. And I interviewed one young guy who is now like the son I never had, Zamil Zedik, played with the San Francisco Symphony. He is brilliant. And he came in, and in his first meeting at the house, he looked up and said, I thought I wanted to play violin. He took a look up at me, he’s a smaller guy, and he said, Oh my God, you don’t want a violin, you want a viola. He said, if you’re lucky today, I just happen to have one in my car. So he went and got it, he brought it in, and I picked it up. He said, I only work with serious students. He said, how serious are you going to be? I said, well, I travel a lot. He said, how many days a year? I said, 120, 130 days a year. He said, well, how many lessons are you going to have? I said, every day that I’m not on the road, other than Sundays, I want a lesson. He said, well, how many would that be a year? I said, I don’t know, a couple hundred probably. His eyes went ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. And we went to work, and that’s 12 years ago. And I’m pretty good. Yes, I do want to be modest. I absolutely love it. Well, you can’t say this about you, but I can say this about you. I can say that if your career as an author of multiple best-selling books doesn’t work out, you know, if your next book really doesn’t go very well, you could be a male model. Oh, okay. All right. You are looking good there. You’re looking good. I mean, I’m serious. You are eating clean, my friend. Six-two, 170. I put it on the show notes. I put down your recommended diet before we get back into all this business stuff. I know we have a lot of listeners out there that want to know this. Well, I’ll tell you this. The only one that would want me to be a model for them would be the AARP, my friends. Okay. All right. So now you recently released an updated copy of your bestselling book, Think Big, Act Small. For the listeners out there who are not familiar with this book, where did you first get the inspiration to write that book originally? Okay. So as I said, I don’t have a lot of inspiration in my life. Stuff just normally doesn’t occur to me. I wish I had a muse that showed up and jumped on my shoulder. It doesn’t happen that way. So it’s always from these hundreds of conversations that I have. One day, I was talking to a CEO. I was going to be doing a speech for his company. We were talking about one of my books. He said, �Well, I like your book.� He said, �I don’t read many business books.� I said, �Well, why not?� He said, �Because most of them are just filled with nationality. He said they’re written by academics who have never done it, and he was kind of down on business books. He said, you know what I would like to know? He said, every company somebody writes about, they say it’s one of the best companies in the United States. He said, I would really like to know who are the best companies in the United States. So I thought, jeez, I would, too. So that’s where these ideas come from. And because I knew at the time, the companies that we hear about all the time are not necessarily the best companies. It’s that they’ve got more, they’ve got more promotion going for them, more public relations going for them. Their CEO’s got a lot of ego and wants to be in the limelight a lot. And so at the end of the day, it’s gotta come down to finances. And so what we did is I hired a research team and we evaluated every publicly traded company in america i’m trying to remember what the total number was i think i can’t i think it looks like seventy thousand companies that we value it for both and the first question we asked was uh… which of these companies have grown their revenues organically that requisition which of these companies grow the revenues organically double digits for ten years well we went to a thousand thousands of companies and we use fax that for all of our financial research, and we came down to the fact that there were like 123 who had grown their revenues double digits every year for 10 years. And then Vijay, one of my researchers, said, but that doesn’t mean anything. He said, unless they were growing their profits at the same time, it means nothing. He said, of these 23, let’s see how many had grown their profits double digits every year for 10 years without a miss. And we did, and we felt the cat and we said surely these ten companies who have grown their revenues organically for a dot ten years about a mess and grow their profits ten years without a mess ten percent every year for ten years but a mess these are the finest companies in the country and bay absolutely distinguish themselves. Great companies like SAS, the fourth largest software company in the world, O’Reilly Automotive, Petco, Medline Enterprises, Dot Foods, I mean these are truly great companies. What you probably do not know is that about seven or eight years later after the book came out, it was still selling very strong and my publisher came to me and said, and I was already working on another hardcover at the time, but he said, you know, it’s time to go back and update that book. And he said, so why don’t you see what they’ve done during the past seven or eight years? And what we found is that every one of them had continued doubling, growing their revenues by double digits every year and growing their profits by double digits every year. So they hadn’t only done it for 10 years, they’d done it for 17 or 18 years. Now Jason, you and I are from a time, I’m 37, so you and I are from a time where people used to go out to dinner, I don’t know if you remember this, but they wouldn’t actually be looking down at a cell phone or a smart phone during dinner. Right. They would be making eye contact. There was a time dinosaurs were roaming the earth and people had like a landline, yellow pages were prevalent, and somebody had to learn how to take and organize notes when writing a book without all the software, without all the tools we now have available. So I’d like to get your approach, because you’re old school and new school. What’s your approach to taking and organizing notes when preparing to write a book? All right, well you gotta remember, I began as a journalist and I early on figured out that when you were standing as a reporter in front of somebody with a notepad in your hand and asking them questions and writing down every word that they said, they became very careful about their responses because they knew their words were being memorialized. I can honestly say I have not taken a note since. I record every interview that I have is recorded. And as I told you, people just spill. They forget the device is there. They forget that I told them that I would like to record the conversation. They forget that. And my promise is, and I give them an added measure of safety, and I say, so what I’m going to do is after this interview today, our conversation will be sent as an audio file and it will become a script. And I’m going to send a copy to you via email, and you take out anything that you want that’s in there that you think you overspoke or you said something wrong. Because I’m not interested in catching you. I’m not interested in writing anything bad. I’m the guy that writes about the good stuff. And so I believe it’s because I don’t take notes that people are so open. We are truly just having a conversation and I get to say, geez, is that fascinating? And then what happened next? What happened as a result of that? Okay, well, but you didn’t finish that story. Tell me about that. One, I couldn’t write that much. And two, they would become very careful and cautious. So I’d record everything, I’d have it transcribed, and that’s how I work. Record everything and then have it transcribed. Now once you have everything transcribed, it’s all recorded, do you have a special place you like to be physically when writing? Do you go down to a van down by the river? Do you go underneath the Golden Gate Bridge? Do you go to an In-N-Out Burger? Do you work out of your house? Where do you go when you’re actually sitting down to write? I can only write one place. I’ve never written one word on an airplane, ever. I’ve never written one word in a hotel room, ever. I’m on lots of airplanes, lots of hotel rooms. I’ve just never had an interest in writing there. There’s only one place I write and that is in my home office. I’ve got this gorgeous view of San Francisco Bay, but I close my door because I don’t even want to look at it. The rule for my writing is when I’m actively working on a book, I want to write 500 perfect words a day. Note, I did not say 500 words a day. That’s real easy. It’s real easy to write long. I like to write 500 perfect words a day. Some days those come in three or four hours. Some days those don’t come until I leave for the gym. Your office sounds like it has a lot of patina, a lot of history, a lot of things that motivate you, that help you create that ambiance that’s conducive to writing. Could you explain to us, for those listeners out there like myself who are very interested in the habits, routines, talk to me about what your office looks like. Wow, great question. Nobody’s ever asked that one before. First of all, my office would probably be 14 by 14. It’s got a set of sliding doors out to a balcony patio. Every time I need to just get some fresh air or just shake it off. I can walk out there and walk up and down the balcony, which looks out on the glorious hills of Northern California. Imagine that one wall is bookcases, built-in bookcases, floor to ceiling. And as you might guess, I’m guessing there’s a couple of thousand books here, and they are all curated. So much like a library would be, my books are curated the same way. I have a glass top desk, a large one, and a glass base. And there’s nothing on my desk, with the exception of a couple of family pictures. Over the years, every time I do a speech, somebody gives me a tchotchke or gives me a gift. They don’t make it to my office. I want my office to be completely cleaned and organized. I have two guest chairs at either end of my glass top desk. I don’t think anybody’s ever sat in them, except on a Saturday morning when the bookkeeper is here and has me sit in one of them, and he wants to go over all the charges and the money I spent that week. Then if I turn around, I look at dual monitors, and behind the monitors is a huge custom piece of art that I had done, and it’s more bookcases on the other side. And I’ve been working on dual monitors for probably 15, 16, 17 years, and would work on three monitors, except I’ve read the productivity studies, and you do not get any increase in productivity from three monitors, as opposed to two monitors. And that’s it. Many, many years ago, the most important person in my life told me that simplicity is elegance. I have a very simple design aesthetic and the only few pieces that exist on the bookshelves are I collect boxes. If I’m in China, if I’m in Vietnam, if I’m in South America, if I’m in Poland, if I’m in Russia, I will always buy a wooden box of some kind. Again, they are curated and they are displayed among the books on some of the shelves. And then, the final thing is, my books have been in 34 languages, so I’ve got a copy of every foreign language edition of my books also in the bookcase. Really? Uh-huh. You know, Randy Pausch was a professor. He was a professor of computer science. He lived between 1960 and I believe 2008. He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote this book called The Last Lecture, when he discovered he had terminal cancer. I remember him. Yeah, and he talked about the importance of having two monitors. I immediately went out there and bought two monitors. Now, all of our employees have two monitors. And that right there could save, Jason, somebody out there hundreds of hours or more a year, just the ability to move data from one source to the other. That’s a powerful tool. One of my monitors flickered this morning and briefly went dark, and I almost had a panic attack. So I was on the phone with my IT concierge, who jumped on via TeamViewer and fixed whatever flickering there was. But no, I really counted having my two monitors. Well, don’t get me all nervous like that. If you get my adrenaline going, I might just send you another monitor. Okay, no, no, I’m fine. Okay, now you also wrote in your book, Think Big, Act Small, you write about keeping your hands dirty. I’d love for you to share what you mean by this, because so many people say, oh, keep your hands clean of this, oh, you’re the boss, you’re the owner, you should keep your hands clean. What does it mean to keep your hands dirty? I’ll answer that one very simply. And we first identified this one when i was uh… writing about sass s a s of the hardware company based in carrie north carolina and uh… the c e o dot jim goodnight one of the most incredible leaders and characters on the planet uh… when they have not built uh… when you walk out of the air drive out of the fast campus it feels like university campus it does not feel like a business park and uh… he actually lives on the grounds a couple of other senior executives live on the grounds. It’s filled with parks, filled with buildings, filled with schools for the kids whose families work there, filled with fitness facilities, filled with art galleries. It’s the most incredible campus I’ve ever been on in my life. And they basically run it like a college or university, although they have increased the revenues double digits for the past 27 years. It’s a most remarkable company. And he spends, Dr. Goodnight is worth billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars. And you’ve probably seen him profiled in 60 Minutes. He hates paying taxes. He would rather spend the money. So if there’s any perk that he can provide his employees, I mean, you know, health care on the campus, done. Schools on the campus, done. Snacks on the campus, done. Concerts on the campus, done. I mean, he would rather spend it on his people than spend it in taxes. I’m just a neat, neat guy. And when he gets a couple of inches of Jack Daniels on the rocks, he tells a mean story. One of the best storytellers I’ve ever met. But he spends half his time, half his time out talking to customers. Half his time. He wouldn’t have to do that at this point in his life. 50% of his time. And all of a sudden, we kept finding it in other companies. CEOs who were spending half their time with customers. Just asking customers, what else can we do for you? I mean, what else itches that we can scratch? How are we doing? What’s a pain point for you that maybe we could make go away? And that’s become known as the 50% rule. I’m next week going to be with 100 CEOs. CEOs, their companies do a billion dollars or more a year, and we’ll be talking about the 50% rule. Don’t ever become so self-important with the title of CEO in an organization that you’re unwilling to spend half your time with customers. Wow. Talk about actionable there. Don’t ever get so busy or so self-important that you don’t spend 50% of your time listening and talking to your customers. Now you also wrote about making short-term goals with long-term horizons. What do you mean by that? Okay, so what I would say that all of these people believe is this. Take care of this year. I mean, hit your goals, hit your objectives, get done what you said you were going to get done. Don’t do it as part of a grandiose five-year plan. You know, when you ask somebody the question, when somebody says, well, you know, today we’re about a $500 million company, but in five years we want to be a $3 billion company. When that’s the reason they exist, they are almost telling you, and we will do anything, including lie, cheat, and steal to get there. They’re chasing the wrong thing. And they’re also engaged in Chinese math in most instances. Now the population of China is 1.4 billion, so if only 1% of the Chinese, certainly 1% of the population would buy what we have, so oh my god, that’s $140 million. Oh my god, man, think about what we’d be worth if we sold $140 million to just 1% of the people in China. So people just show up themselves with Chinese math, with long, grandiose plans. You have to have some idea of where you want to go. You’ve got to have some idea of what you want to be. But you know what? Every one of these companies takes care of business now. This is a powerful concept. You have to take care of business now. You can’t have BS math. You just can’t. Jason, there are so many people that say, gosh, my product is so good. If I could just tell the 1% of the American population, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that math, and it just doesn’t work. Now you also wrote this book that, you just keep writing these mind-expanding books. I’ve had to duct tape my head together figuratively numerous times. The Reinventors, how extraordinary companies pursue radical, continuous change, is in itself an inspirational teaching moment. I love the cover of the book I mean the book the book cover itself is inspiring Can you talk to us about this book the reinventors and what it’s all about I can and I can tell you where it came from It came from my conversations with people Getting ready for speeches. I remember the day that it happened. We were at our Lake Place in Michigan and I was up in my study. I was talking to the CEO of a small IT company with a couple of hundred employees in Iowa. And I said, how are you? And, well, first of all, I said more than that. I thanked him for his time and explained what I hoped to accomplish through the call. I said, �How are you?� He said, �I�m much better today than I was last week.� I said, �Well, why is that? What�s happening? What�s going on?� He said, �You know, I just sometimes let people get me down.� He said, �Finally, I have the realization that I�m in charge and that I have to do whatever is necessary to grow this company and take it to where I promised the people it would be because it’s going to have a positive impact on their lives and he said I’m having difficulty I’m not going to have anybody else commoditize me anymore and so what I was hearing from a lot of people were that there would be downward pressure on prices they’re being commoditized well the problem is if the only thing you’ve got to talk about is price, there’s only one way to go, and that’s down. I’ve never seen a discussion of price go upward. It always ends up with you going down in your price. So all you’ve got to talk about is price. So there needs to be something else in the game, the value add, the value that you’re going to create. And I thought, I need to find the companies that have just mastered the art of getting out of the commodity marketplace, who have mastered the art of changing the rules and just constantly learn how to create more value and do more for their customers and earn more and more money. And so it was the reinventors, how extraordinary companies pursue radical, continuous change. And that’s what they do. And there’s a few reasons that that has to happen. One, yesterday’s breadwinners are not going to get you where you want to go. Not going to happen. What brought you to where you are is not going to get you where you want to go. So you’ve got to be willing to let go of yesterday’s breadwinners. You have to get rid of same old, same old. So during my speeches, I look out in the audience and I say, I want everybody to shout out and finish this statement for me. If it ain’t broke, and everybody shouts, don’t break it. And I go, there’s only one problem with that. That flies in the face of the law of suckage. Suckage. And he starts to titter and laugh, and I say, you know what the law of suckage says? By the time you figure out you suck, you have sucked for a long, long time. And the audience goes absolutely crazy. So you’ve got to be constantly letting go of same old, same old. You’ve got to be letting go of ego, and you’ve got to be letting go of conventional wisdom. And so we basically identified the companies that have done the most incredible job of constantly reinventing themselves. You know, I tell clients all the time, I say, in the absence of value, price is the only consideration. Yep. In the absence of value, price is the only consideration. And if you are finding yourself in a business right now where you’re being commoditized, the prices are being driven down, you’re competing on price only, unless you’re Walmart, that’s not a game you want to get involved in. That’s why your book, I think, The Reinventors is a fabulous purchase for anybody. And what better way to say I love you, Chow, during the month of September than with the gift of a Jason Jennings bestselling book, The Reinventors. It really is the gift that keeps on giving, Clay. Now in Chapter 3, you write about picking the destination. What does this mean to you, to pick the destination? Well, so the destination, when I talk about the destination, that was shared with me by a CEO who had taken over a troubled company and then made it into one of my books. He said, ìLook, a great CEO or great leader is really a travel agent.î I probably looked puzzled, and he said, ìYouíve got to find a destination. Youíve got to find where you want to be, and then youíve got to invite people to make an investment and come along on the same journey with you. And it was Pat Hasse, and it was Allegheny Technologies. And what an incredible job he did turning that company around. So what is the destination is the word. And I guess as we’re coming to a close, or close to a close, it’s a perfect time for me to invoke the one word I haven’t mentioned today, and that word is this, and it’s almost the only word I use in my life, in my speeches, in my books, and that is the word purpose. The destination is actually what your purpose is, not what your vision statement is, forget it, not what your mission statement is, forget it. It’s what you are really trying to be, what you are really trying to become, it’s what you’re really trying to go. Let me give you a few quick examples. Ingvar Kamprad, built the world’s only global furniture brand, IKEA. An unbelievable story. So what was his vision statement? He didn’t have a vision statement. What was his mission statement? He didn’t have a mission statement. He said, we’re not in the furniture business. He said, we exist to improve the lives of the many. He said rich people don’t shop here. We don’t want rich people to shop here. We want the many to shop here and we want to improve the lives of the many and the only people I want to have working here are those who want to set out to improve the lives of the many. And at Ikea what they do every year is they celebrate price reductions, not price increases, price reductions. I think of ComEd in Chicago and Pramajyori, one of the most incredible female CEOs I’ve ever met. You know, what is ComEd? It’s a power distribution company. They shoot electricity through copper wires. Who in the heck wants to work for them? That’s like a dinosaur industry. How did she turn around the fortunes of the company? She said, what? You think we distribute power? She said, we don’t distribute electricity. She said, we power people’s lives there wouldn’t be a life-saving cancer surgery going on right now if we didn’t power people’s lives kids would not be playing soccer games and football games at night if we didn’t power people’s lives people would die of heat stroke in the summer if we didn’t power people’s lives people would freeze in the winter if we didn’t power people’s lives and she reversed the fortune of the company immediately. O’Reilly Automotive, the only company I’ve ever known to have increased the revenues double digits for 59 out of 60 years. Wow. They’re not in the auto parts business. When Charlie O’Reilly found out about O’Reilly Automotive, the night before they opened the doors, he said, you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna offer the best service in the world. He didn’t say the best service in Missouri. He didn’t say the best service in the United States. He said, we’re going to offer the best service in the world. And he said, you know how we’re going to do that? We’re going to do that by making the customer number two. Everybody looked at him, what? He said, we’re going to make you number one. Because only if we make you number one can we ever hope to offer the greatest customer service in the world. You know, your books are so filled with powerful case studies. I encourage all the listeners out there to check out your book, The Reinventors, How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change. And out of respect for your time, I have two final questions that I wanted to pick your brain on. The habits and routines that make ultra-successful people like yourself a reality. There’s these habits and routines, there’s these things you do in the first hour of your day every day that very few other people are doing, maybe the first two hours of the day, would you share with us how you spend the first couple hours of every day? I will. I would be happy to. Now, this is going to sound interesting. Remember, I’m the guy that wrote, It’s Not the Big that Eats the Small, It’s the Fast that Eats the Slow. I wrote the High Speed Company. So you might think that I jump out of bed at 4.30 in the morning and just I’m raring to go 100 miles an hour. Not the case. Because I think speed without a reason for speed is really reckless. So let me tell you, I’m up every morning at about 4.30. The first hour is for me. Why did I make it 4.30? Because nobody else is awake. Nobody is going to bother me. That time belongs to me. And so what I spend that hour doing is the first, so I make my cup of decaf and take two sips as I told you earlier. That’s it. I don’t even like the taste, but it’s something warm. And then the first thing I do is ten minutes of gratitude. And that is gratitude for people. It might be gratitude for a client I haven’t seen for eight years, but I’m grateful for the way they touched my life. It might be a family member. It might be this beautiful home that I get to live in. It might be that I’m grateful that I’m successful enough to have a trainer in the gym kicking me in the butt six days a week wherever I am in the world. So I spent the first 10 minutes really in gratitude. Then I spent the next 10 minutes, and I measured this out on my iPhone, then I spent the next 10 minutes asking what I really want to accomplish today. And that’s not my schedule, because my schedule has already been built. I’ll have to open up my Elbow calendar to know what my schedule is. But it’s a time of contemplation and asking, what big do I want to get done today? And then it’s a final 10 minutes imagining what my day is going to look like. Because if I can imagine the day, then I can have that day be the way I imagined it. So that takes the first half hour. Then I spend 30 minutes reading and watching, catching up on the news. That’s a combination of television, several televisions, iPhones, newspapers, magazines. Then I take about 30 minutes to get ready, and then I spend one hour of answering emails. And that’s the first two and a half hours of my day. And then I open up my to-do list and start crossing items off the list. It might be a book, it might be a podcast, it might be a speech, whatever it is. But that first hour of the morning really sets the track for the day. Thrivers, listen to this part of the podcast numerous times. People that can design the life they want to live, it’s amazing the productivity improvement you can have because nothing that gets, anything that does not get scheduled just doesn’t get done. And I love your intentionality, just the purposefulness of how you plan your day. Jason, for anybody out there who would like to buy your books or find out more about you, I know everybody can pick them up on Amazon. Everybody knows how Google works, but where would you direct people to? What’s the one point of contact where you would most like people to find out more about you and the books that you’ve put together over the years? I guess the first point of contact would probably be my website. It’s just jason-jennings.com, and that dash is like a hyphen, jason-jennings.com. That’s the website, and there’s a big section, all of my books. It tells you briefly a little bit. We don’t sell books on my website, so this is not a pitch to sell books. It’ll actually be a two-step process, but if you want to find out about them, go to the website. The story of all the books are there, the pictures of all the foreign language editions are there. If you want to know anything about me, I’m really pretty transparent. My life is an open book. So that’s probably the best point of contact. And then of course, everybody knows where to get books. Books a Million, Borders, Amazon, they’re all over the place. Jason, I appreciate you so much on behalf of our hundreds of thousands of listeners for taking time out of your schedule and away from your beautiful view in San Francisco to be here with us. And I’m sorry for taking you away from your beef jerky for this long, but hopefully you still have time to eat that. And get to the gym. I got to tell you guys something. I’ve done hundreds of podcasts and radio interviews, maybe thousands, I’m not sure. I’ve ever done. You guys are really, really sharp cookies. And if you ever want me back, don’t hesitate. I really dig you guys. Oh, Chubb, how sharp was Jason Jennings right there? On top of his game, I tell you what. Man, his books are so good. His interview is so good. His routine is so good. Everything about it was just good. It was almost too good. Too good. When we wrap up today’s podcast, I need to go write down a list of ways that Jason is beating me in the game of life, and I need to stop after about four hours of writing that list. I was going to say, yeah. Because this guy, he eats the perfect diet. He’s very intentional. He writes the perfect books. He plays the viola. Expertly, apparently. I’ll tell you what, Thrive Nation, I encourage you to go check out his website today. If you’ve yet to visit his website, it’s worth seeing. The guy has written case studies on some of the biggest companies in the world, and you would be really missing out on something if you don’t read one of his books, because they have the power to absolutely transform your organization, as they did for me many years ago. You can learn more at jason-jennings.com. It’s jason-jennings.com. And Chubb, without any further ado, 3, 2, 1, boom! Well, folks, on part one of today’s show, we interviewed Jason Jennings, the legendary author, and we’re talking about how to grow a successful company. Now, for many of us, as we hear about this idea of growing a successful company, it might be difficult to think about how to build a successful company unless we’ve seen one in action. And so on today’s show, we’re interviewing Gabe Salinas, the founder of windowninjas.com, a long-time client who’s been able to achieve financial success, time freedom, financial freedom by systemizing every aspect of his business. Gabe, welcome on to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Man, I’m great, Clay. What about yourself? Everything good today? Brother, I’m fired up to talk to you. I have to ask you this here. What does it mean in your mind to have built a successful company? Like, what does that mean? And why should everybody out there watching want to build a successful company? Well, you know, everybody likes to enjoy the fruits of their labor. And I have labored for a long time building Window Ninjas into what it is. And now we’re franchising, so that’s another big win. But yeah, it’s nice to see that your vision has come to reality and that the reality is paying dividends and every day is a joy because I get to do the things that I love and enjoy. I get to meet great people. I get to work with a bunch of great people. I get to motivate people. I get to where my employees are winning every single day and my customers are winning every single day. So, I mean, it’s really a satisfying thing to have a business that’s growing, thriving, and doing really well, and providing a level of customer service that kind of falls short a little bit in today’s day and age. So we’re going to continue our discussion from part one where we’re talking about building – achieving sustainable business growth by implementing systems. And so if somebody buys a WindowNinjas.com franchise, I’m going to walk people through some of the systems you have in place. I’d really like for you to share a little detail on that. So first off, you have a system for the branding. You have a system for the marketing. You have a system for the business. It’s not just a series of random opinions or feelings. It’s a documented system. And to put just a little bit more traction on it, I’m going to zoom in to a page from my book here called How to Become Sustainably Rich, so people can just kind of see your business and then they can see these principles. So you’ve already figured out, and this is box number one on our workflow here, you’ve already figured out your revenue goals. I’m not gonna ask you to share those on today’s show. You already know what kind of sales you have to do to break even, and everybody who buys a franchise from you is going to know how many sales they need to do to break even. You’ve already defined the ideal schedule that works well for you and your business. But point four, I want you to see if you can talk about this and break this down a little bit. You guys have figured out your unique value proposition. You guys have figured out what makes you unique in this cluttered marketplace. Tell us, what have you done to make Window Ninja stand out amidst the clutter of commerce? Well, one of the very first things we start with is branding. I talk to all of our team players about this. All of our trucks are logoed with our Ninjas logo. Nigel was always looking fresh on both sides of the truck and the back. We even put them on the hood. That way our customers understand who our brand is, they know who’s coming to their house or their commercial facility. All the marketing that we provide for our franchisees and our locations all have our logos on them. So just something as simple as having your logo and branding it and getting it out there into the world so that everybody recognizes it and understands and knows what it is, is really, really important. That’s always step one is with the marketing and getting that, your name and your brand out there. And the fact that we’ve got it out there in multiple states, multiple cities, we’re growing and thriving. It’s definitely a by-product of the success that we’ve had on the marketing side. And every one of our franchisees understand it. It’s something that we teach every single one of them when they come in and we get them onboarded. We tell them about the branding, how it’s important. All of our service technicians arrive in a company logoed vehicle. They also arrive in full uniform. So that way that branding continues on throughout the whole experience that the customer gets to receive. Even from that thank you call after the service is completed, our call center agents will do a great job of calling that customer just to say thanks and just to make sure that they, again, are continually branding our image and that likeness with that client. And we go back to this again, folks. Look at these boxes here, folks. Again, we’re pulling this up, we’re breaking it down. We’re giving you a lot of detail on today’s show, folks. A lot of detail joined with an entrepreneur that’s actually done it. So once you have your unique value proposition nailed down, you have to nail down your branding. And again, you’re not just operating your business in a world free of competition. I mean, you have a lot of competition if you’re a business owner. And that’s one of the values of buying a franchise is there’s already proven turnkey systems and processes in place. So let’s talk about the branding for a second here. The branding, again, that’s the website, that’s the print pieces, that’s the business card, that’s the auto wrap. If somebody buys a franchise from windowninjas.com, what kind of branding do they start out with? Well, I mean, right off the bat, they’re getting everything from logo t-shirts. We, the area managers and the franchisees owners, they get specific like polos, specific brand that we wear, they’re logoed up and every single thing that we put in front of a client is going to be branded with our image and our likeness like we talked about earlier. On our marketing side, every email that gets sent out has our brand logo on it, every quote, every estimate, every single thing that a customer sees is going to have our brand on it. We make sure that it’s always, always, always in the proper manner and gets in front of the people whose eyes can see it because the more people that see your brand, the more money and revenue you’re going to make. And when you continually get your brand out there over and over and over again on multiple different channels and multiple different ways, whether it’s from flyers or mailers or yard signs or the logo trucks or the employees that are showing up in fully uniformed, logoed uniforms, man, it really, really, really makes a huge impact. People feel safe and secure when they know and recognize a brand, and they definitely feel safe and secure when guys show up at their home in a fully logoed vehicle and in full uniform with logos on them. It’s really important. Again, you’ve thought about this entire process. You’ve nailed it down. That’s why this is a successful business. Now, creating a three-legged marketing stool, box number six, I see so many business owners that don’t know how to generate customers. That is not a problem that you have. You know how to generate customers, and that’s one of the big values that you offer there at windowninjas.com. Let’s talk about how you guys generate clients. If I’m out there today and I buy a window ninjas.com franchise, let’s talk about the marketing systems that you have in place to help franchisees generate leads. Oh man, I’m glad. I love talking about this, Clay. Man, we have with our franchisees, we have three different packages. We have a gold, a silver, a gold and a platinum package. And we go through each franchisee and talk to them about each one of those packages. How much is it gonna cost? What does it go towards? You know, there’s all kinds of things like Google advertising, pay-per-click. You’ll have Google local services. You’re running Facebook or Meta ads. Sometimes we’re even running Instagram ads. So we go through and talk to all of them about those specific products that we’re utilizing for marketing and branding. And then what the cost of those are. And then we just, like I said, we give them three options. It’s really, really cool. They can choose option A, B, or C, silver, gold, or platinum based on how many leads they want to generate, what kind of revenue they’re trying to produce, what their personal financial goals may be, and what their business financial goals are gonna be. So we take all of that, wrap it up, put a bow on it, give them the package they want, and then we go to work and get all of that stuff done. That includes the SEO work for the website, everything from top to bottom. That way it makes it really easy for a franchise because if they know that there’s a set system in place, that they can just say, hey, this is what we’re going to spend, this is what our budget is, here’s the card, go ahead and get these things run, this is my portion of my marketing that I’m going to spend every single month, great, let’s do it. Man, then the leads come in, we tackle those leads, we get them sold, we get them closed and then those guys are out there rocking and rolling, actually performing the services and making revenue, which is really, really, really awesome. So let’s keep going here. So as we’re getting that momentum going, folks, we’re building these workflows, we’re building these sustainable systems. Now we move into sales. You guys have a call center, you record the calls for quality assurance, you guys have a system and a process for everything, walk us through why that’s a value for a franchisee that your team records the calls, that your team makes the calls, that your team staffs the call center for the franchisees. Well, for the franchisees, it gives them the time, freedom and financial freedom. So in the early stages, most of our franchisees are actually physically doing the work. They’re building up their clientele. They’re teaching new employees how to actually perform the services and they just don’t have time to answer that phone because it rings so often or a lot of customers today Clay are actually sending in service requests online a lot of customers don’t want to talk about about it on the phone they just want to type in their computer hey I wanted to schedule on this date they send it right over and the cool thing about our call center is is that we handle all of that for you yeah it is part of their fees that they pay but it is so much more cost effective and efficient for us to provide that service to our franchisees because we’re able to get on the phone with the client immediately because we always answer our phones live. Whereas if a service technician or one of the new franchisees, if he’s out there trying to train one of his guys, or maybe he’s talking to a potential client, he’s not going to be able to answer that call. And it costs a lot of money to have an employee sit in an office and take those calls. You got to have internet, you got to house that employee. I mean, there’s a lot of expenses that go into it. And with our fee that we charge, it is a fraction of what they would pay or lose their mind by trying to tackle 15 tasks and answer the phone at the same time. It’s a huge benefit for our franchisees that for us to have a call center the way we do. Also, you staff and manage the employees. I mean, you hire the employees, you train the employees. As you mentioned, you house them, you train them, you equip them. There’s so much value that you offer there. Now we move on to box number eight. You’ve got to figure out how much it costs to get a new customer, folks. And if you’re out there today and you have a business and you don’t know what it costs to get a new customer, that can be a problem. In the case of Window Ninjas, they have a system for that. Box number nine, you’ve got systems and processes for everything. Everything is a checklist, everything is a system, everything’s written down, everything’s recorded, everything’s documented. Talk to the listeners out there about the importance of having documented systems and processes. Man, if you have ever run a business without documented systems and processes, you are definitely not experiencing, or you’re really not living if you haven’t ever gone through that. And I have gone for that before we met with you, Clay, we were doing that exact thing. We had all these things in our head. We kind of knew what was going on, but there was always a problem. And once we got to where we started, like literally writing everything out, doing the checklist, making sure everybody knew how to do them, making sure that there’s processes for every single thing that we do from answering the phone to cleaning a window to pressure washing a house to installing holiday lights or cleaning out a gutter. Man, once we did all that and then started utilizing those checklists in conjunction with training our employees and teaching them how their specific job was or is supposed to be done and they’re using those checklists and they’re understanding what the process is and they understand that, hey, this is what the whole system looks like and how you’re just one cog in this wheel and it’s super important. Man, when we did that, it was a game changer. I mean, it really, really, really increased revenue, increased efficiency, and it took a load off of my shoulders and my manager’s shoulders because we just weren’t running around anymore with our hair on fire. A lot of the frustrations just simply went away all by making sure that everything was systemized, documented, and implemented. You know, one of the things that you talked about there, and that’s one of the joys of working with great people like you, is you know I first started working with Oxifresh years ago, and I met Jonathan Barnett at college. Actually, Jonathan Barnett, the founder of Oxifresh.com. I went to college with him and helping him scale the business. Now there’s 500 locations and with his business, your business, everybody’s business, just getting everything into a system and not just a system, but a system that works. You’re not documenting theories, you’re documenting land, the proven plant. I mean, this allows you to stop throwing gutter balls. I mean, this is like a bumper bowling for business at that point. Could you talk to anybody out there that maybe hasn’t taken the time to build the systems and to build a turnkey business model. Again, just for anybody out there that’s hearing these words for the first time, because, I mean, that’s what we talk about, and you’re a living example of what it’s like to systemize everything. What’s it like, you know, like before we met, where there’s not a turnkey marketing system in place, and you’re out there trying new things and trying new mailers and new advertisements and new billboard concepts and new auto-wrap ideas and new call scripts and new systems for everything. What’s it like when nothing is documented and the proven processes aren’t all in one place? It’s just mind-numbing, man. It makes you where you don’t want to come to work every day. It’s really, it gets hard. And the more you scale and the larger you get and the more trucks you have and the more employees you bring on, you really want everybody working on the same team doing this just basically moving in the same direction right. We’re going to row our boat down the stream but we always want to go in the right direction right. We’re always we don’t want to go upstream we want to go downstream okay. But man it’s important by having this because otherwise when you don’t have them then you’ve got haphazard training. Everybody doesn’t understand what this guy’s doing because this guy’s not not doing it the way that they were taught because somebody didn’t have the system to teach this person the proper way. But like I said, Clay, when you get all that stuff done and written out and implemented and placed somewhere where new employees can come in and you can say, hey, step one, this is what we do to do this. Step two, this is how we do this. And just keep going through. It makes a great experience for the employee when they’re trying to learn. They learn faster. They master faster and then the customer service experience for the person who’s actually purchasing our services, man they have a great, great experience because it’s always the same. The way we answer our phone calls are always the same. Every single one of our employees knows how to answer the phone properly, okay. That way if you call our office Clay and you might talk to Emily but hey if you need to call back because you forgot something and Jeff picks up the phone, those two people are gonna answer the phone the same. You’re gonna recognize that branding, you’re gonna recognize that this experience is the same and it’s very cohesive and you’re gonna enjoy it. And that’s what we’re after over here at Window Ninjas. And I think a lot of businesses, once they get their businesses scaled kind of to the level that you’ve helped us do, Clay, get everything systemized, everything documented, everything in a place when it comes to training and that sort of thing. Man, it really runs simply, it runs smooth and then allows your managers to oversee their employees and make sure that they’re following the processes properly. It’s just a cohesive unit at that point. Everybody’s moving in the same direction. We’re not having any hiccups, we’re not getting stuck in the mud, we’re not scratching our head trying to figure out a new problem today because it was the same problem that showed up two weeks ago and just never got fixed because we’ve already got the system for it, man. We already know how to solve that problem. We already know how to help the client. We already know how to generate leads. We already know how to make money and it’s all because of systemizing. I’ll be very vague on this because I don’t want to divulge the financial situation of one of my clients, but we have a client, a long time client that was able to sell his business this week for $43 million. Wow. $43 million. Worked with this client for years and years and years. And I got on the phone with this person and I said, how are you? And they said, hey, I just sold the business for 43 million. Now someone says 43 million, wow, that’s a big number. How did they do it? Well, let me tell you this. They had all the systems in place and they were implementing these systems every day, every year, every week, every single week, folks, they were implementing the systems, they were running the plan. And eventually a competitor recognized, wow, this guy cannot be stopped. So they’ve teamed up with other competitors and they came together as a pool of people and they said, look, we as a buyer group want to basically buy your business so you’ll stop competing with us. And so my client walked away with a $43 million paycheck and some other bonuses there. And again, it’s because there’s systems in place. Why is a, you know, why is a Window Ninja’s business valuable, more valuable than just having some squeegees and some vans and some cars and some auto wraps? Like why, why is the the total system of a window ninjas franchise more valuable than the the actual parts of the squeegees and the vans and the the people? Walk, walk us through the value of window ninjas dot com franchises. Well, like I said earlier, Clay, if you’re going to buy a business, you want to buy a business. You want a business that can be capable of running without you. If you’re an owner who’s operating a business that doesn’t have everything written down, it doesn’t have all of the systems in place, doesn’t have a process that’s literally written out, then that process is going to get done 15 different ways if you have 15 employees. And that is going to be mind numbing. The customer is not going to get the same experience. You’re probably not going to have a lot of retention when it comes to customers. And you’re probably not going to have a lot of retention when it comes to employees. So making sure that all these systems are in place, making sure that all the processes are documented, making sure that all the employees understand what each system is, how different parts of the business work with each other. Like you were talking about squeegees and with the squeegee you got a handle, there’s three parts to a squeegee. You got a handle, you got a channel, and you got a rubber. So the rubber fits in the channel and the channel fits in the handle and the handle has to clamp onto the channel in order to take the lead, schedule the lead, and then it hands over to our service technicians who then have to go out there and physically go to that customer’s house, follow the systems and process of actually doing the service for that client. Then we have to get paid, which means then that money has to go over to the accounting department, and the accounting department needs to know how to process that payment, make sure the funds are in the bank. That means they can make sure that the bills are paid, which means they can go ahead and make sure that the employees are paid. And so through each one of those little sections that I gave you, there is a specific and unique process that has to be done every single time. And if you didn’t have everything written out, Clay, my gosh, it would be horrendous. People wouldn’t get paid, whether it’s you or your employees, bills probably wouldn’t get paid, squeegees wouldn’t get put together. Who knows? Maybe the guys would forget their scrubbers and so therefore they’re out in the field and they don’t know that, oh my gosh, how am I going to actually put some soap on the window if I don’t have my T-bar? So, I mean, you can really break this down into so many different levels, Clay, it’s not even funny. But I think you and I have definitely gotten across today to everybody who’s listening or watching this, that systems and processes work. They definitely exceed other companies that do not systemize and make processes for their specific business. And a business that doesn’t have any of that stuff is not worth as much money as a company or a business that is fully implemented in systems and processes. Amen to that. Well, folks, if you want to team up with a proven brand that’s growing and going places, I recommend you schedule a consultation today at window ninjas.com to learn more about buying a window ninjas.com franchise. Again, you can schedule a free consultation today with window ninjas.com to learn more about buying a window ninjas.com franchise. A final 30 seconds here. Why should everybody buy a window ninjas.com franchise and how much money does it cost? Man, a window ninjas.com franchise is the thing to do. It is an awesome, awesome, awesome opportunity. We just closed our sixth franchise this week, which was really, really fun and exciting. Profits are amazing. We make it fun over here at Window Ninjas. We take a load off of all of our franchisees and our employees because we have so many different parts of the business that actually handle the clients, handles them from a sales standpoint to a service standpoint, to marketing, everything. I mean, it just, it’s so much easy when you go into a franchise system like ours. And the home service industry is huge right now. That is one of the top, top, top revenue producing industries in franchising today. And a lot of people just don’t have time or energy to maintain their homes or commercial properties and things of that nature. So they need companies like ours to go out there and make sure that their properties are well protected, cared for, and increasing in value. And so Clay, that’s one of the main reasons why I always talk to people about this particular business is that we’re in a great industry and we have a great service that we offer and we definitely have a service that our clients enjoy and Use over and over and over again throughout the year So anybody interested in purchasing a window ninjas comm franchise by all means reach out to us check us out on our website We’ve got a bunch of information on there and then fill out that form It’ll come over to one of my sales guys and you know what they’re gonna bring it over to me and we’re going to get on the phone and we’re going to have a little conversation About how you can benefit from a window ninjas franchise Gabe Salinas Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your wisdom with us again. That’s window ninjas.com Gabe’s been a longtime client It’s been an honor to serve him and it’s fun to watch this business grow and to continue to expand all across the country by Offering tremendous value to customers and to franchise owners alike again. That’s window ninjas.com Gabe. Take care. Have a great day, sir. Thanks. You too, Clay. Thanks for having me. I’m Jerry from Jerry’s Landscape. We do irrigation, tree removal, landscaping. We pretty much do it all. I can landscape the heck out of a property. That’s never really been a problem for me. I’ve had a tough time with accounting, with my bookkeeping, but then I came up with this amazing system that has really been a game changer for me. This side of the dash here, this is all the invoices. This side of the dash is going to be expenses. Then I’ve got any miscellaneous receipts or anything like that, that goes in the back seat. Then of course anything tax related. You know, I don’t even know what half that stuff is. But anything from Urse, that’s going to go right here on the passenger side floor board. I’ve even got a place for customer complaints. Right out here. I’m kidding, actually it’s not really the best to even open the windows at all. Blow everything around. Is it a perfect system? No. I can’t use the defrost in my truck which sucks you know having passengers that doesn’t always work out so well but it’s a small price to pay we’re meticulous every transaction matters period okay I mean the system that’s what I love about it’s virtually foolproof JT, do you know what time it is? Um, 410. It’s Tebow time in Tulsa, Oklahoma, baby. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma during the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th, 2024. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Growth Workshop. Yes, folks, put it in your calendar this December, the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the Thrive Time Show two day interactive Business Growth Workshop. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old. And a lot of people, you know, they follow 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’s 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. Over the years we’ve had the opportunity to feature Michael Levine, the PR consultant of choice for Nike, for Prince, for Michael Jackson. We’ve had 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 rustic cuff.com, a company that creates apparel worn by celebrities all throughout the world. Jill Donovan, the founder of rustic cuff.com, has spoken at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshops. We have the guy, we’ve had the man who’s responsible for turning around Harley Davidson, a man by the name of Ken Schmidt. He has spoken at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops. Folks, I’m telling you, these events are going to teach you what you need to know to start and grow a successful business. And the way we price the events, the way we do these events, is you can pay $250 for a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. Yes, we’ve designed these events to be affordable for you and we want to see you live and in person at the two-day interactive December 5th and 6th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. Everything that you need to succeed will be taught at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop December 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the way we do these events is we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a question and answer session so that wonderful people like you can have your questions answered. Yes, we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a 15 minute question and answer session. It’s interactive, it’s two days, it’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ve been doing these events since 2005 and I’m telling you folks, it’s going to blow your mind. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop is America’s highest rated and most reviewed business 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 thrive time show.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. And someone says, Tulsa, Jerusalem. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Jerusalem, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show in Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. Who? You. You’re going to come. Who? I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at thrivetimeshow.com and again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things. And those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. 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 Edith Bick chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert, Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you got to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets, and if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Kiyosaki Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And I have a and of 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 his 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 wanna show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorn, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old, working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. He said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? I said, no. 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. I went from being an employee to self-employed, to the business owner, to the investor. I owe a lot of that to you. I just want to take a moment to tell you thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. 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 too, or bad influencers. Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not a thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the academy at Kings Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say.