Clay Clark | Know Your Numbers | “Don’t Ever Let Your Business Get Ahead of the Financial Side of Your Business. Know You Numbers.” – Tilman Fertitta + How to Gain Traction In a World of Perpetual Distraction + Interview With Gino Wickman

Audio Transcription

Everything is know your numbers. That’s the biggest mistake that young entrepreneurs make. You’ve got to understand your cost of sales, you want to understand your revenue, and you want to understand your profits. Everything is about liquidity in business. And if you don’t know your numbers, know your receivables, know your payables, you’ll never be successful. Not even in your home life will you be successful. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you. And they have a lot of time on their hands. This started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show, starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zilman. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We took a ride, 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 hooks. I break down the books. She’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks As a father of five, that’s why I’m alive So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi It’s the C-N-T, up on your right, P-O And now, 3, 2, 1, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get there We started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom, now we here 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. Today’s show, there’s something super going on today’s show. Oh yeah, oh yeah. You see, Z, years ago you invested in a bank. You invested in a bank. Bought a bank with some buddies, yeah. You bought a bank with some buddies, and the bank was called Regent Bank. This is true. And I was sitting down with one of your banking buddies, as banking buddies often do. You guys were milling around the lobby looking for free suckers and stuff like that. Toasters that weren’t handed out. Whatever, just free stuff. Free popcorn, whatever. And I’m talking to your partner, Sean Copeland, who was, I believe, the CEO of Regent Bank and the Secretary of Commerce for the state of Oklahoma. I know, he’s got a big deal now. And I said, Sean, in this vast lobby of Regent Bank, and in your vast office and in just in all the all the things that are that you all the resources for entrepreneurial education that you have at your disposal all the resources you have what is the number one book that you would recommend to me and Sean says traction by Gino Wichman and I thought to myself self self I should write that down then you and I traveled to Oklahoma City where we met Pesh Patel who built a huge company called Digital Tutors, which is over millions and millions of dollars. And you and I, we asked him, we said, Peesh, we were at the Charleston’s, and we said, Peesh, what book should we be reading? And he says, you should be reading Traction by Geno Wigman. And so now without any further ado, Geno Wigman, welcome on to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? I am great. What a great opening, you guys. And bestow my heart on that story. When you share that story about the book, I’m reminded of the 31 times I got turned down by publishers for that book. So that’s really awesome to hear. Well, let’s talk about this here. You have this idea that’s been in your soul for a while. It’s this concept of the entrepreneurial leap. Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? When did you first start having this idea? When did you start wrestling with this idea that would later manifest itself in the book form? It was exactly 12 years ago when I was 40 years old and building EOS Worldwide. I said, when I turn 50, I’m shifting my energy to the front end of the entrepreneurial journey and I’m going to help entrepreneurs in the making get a huge jump start on taking their entrepreneurial leaps. That’s awesome. I think I teared up a little bit there. So tell us the title of your new book as he tries to get it back together here emotionally. The book is called Entrepreneurial Leap. Do you have what it takes to become an entrepreneur? Okay, now I have actually gone through your book and I have a lot of notes here and if it’s okay, I would like to read out a few of the essential traits that are in the book. I certainly won’t share all of the traits that are in the book. See, I’m the kind of guy, I’m going to share just enough to make our listeners get to a place where they can’t stand it. They can’t. You’re going to let them get their beaks wet is what you’re going to do. Right. It’s a no-brainer. I’m going to give them just enough content. They’re going to say, I want to come back. I want to buy the rest of it. So here we go. Essential trait number one. You said here, the visionary, ideas, connect the dots, the sixth sense. When we’re talking about the six essential traits of an entrepreneur, talk to me about this essential trait number one, the visionary. Yeah, and so that is a trait that you are absolutely born with, as are all the other six traits. It’s a very debatable topic, but somebody that has this trait in them, they just see the world a different way than most people. Their brain is always working and as you said they connect the dots and so they’re seeing all these moving parts in the world and they just put those dots together. They have this sixth sense. They’re able to see around corners and again so they just put things together and come up with great ideas that ultimately manifest into businesses that make a nice impact on the world. They don’t see dead people, do they? Or is that a different sense? That’s a different kind of sense. That’s a different sense. That’s a different sense. Okay, I wasn’t sure, Gino. I didn’t know. Gino, I have a sixth sense. I’ve had a lot of success in business, and I see patterns. This is not a political show. I’m going to throw out an idea, Z, to you. Gino’s not saying this. I’m saying this. Oh, yeah. I’ve noticed that if you want to go to a large gathering of people right now you have to bring a brick. And we continue. Or a bat. Or just have a protest that’s peaceful. Can you go to a restaurant yet? Can you do restaurants in Michigan right now? Can you do that? Literally yesterday. Yes! Yes! Yes! Get your burger! I want to hug somebody. I want to do it. Okay. No lions. Okay, so here we go. Now, essential trait number two, passionate. You’ve got to be passionate for your products, your service. You have a strong belief to fill a void. Talk to me about this passion, because I see a lot of people that want, they want to be an entrepreneur, but there’s no passion. Talk to me about this, Gino. Talk to me about this passion. Yeah, well, sadly, it’s just not going to happen if you don’t have passion. So typically, again, that passion, as you said, is around that entrepreneur’s thing, whatever that thing is, the dent they want to put the universe, the product, the service, the void they want to fill. And so they have this undying passion that as they keep getting their ass kicked and knocked down for 10 years as they’re building what they’re building, they just keep getting up. And the only thing that’s ever going to get you up that many times is that incredible passion for what you want to do in the world. Now, Gino, I don’t know if you would agree with this. I have made a list of the eight traits to be an unsuccessful entrepreneur. Okay? And I’ll just read off a few of them. One is have no vision. Two is have no passion at all. None. Zero. Zero. And I’m going to skip through. I have one more final tip I’m going to cue up. This is a tip for being not successful as an entrepreneur. Here we go. Probably my best tip is tip number eight. Always keep bags of your own poop. Collect it throughout your stay and just have it ready. Would you agree with that? Is that a pro tip for not being a pro entrepreneur? Gino, do you agree with that? I’m going to plead the fifth on that, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Gino, I’ve got a question for you. I’ve been trying for a few weeks. There’s so many people that come up to us and they say, listen, we want to be an entrepreneur. We love your show. We love what you’re doing. Rah, rah, rah. Bah, dah, bah, dah. And then how would someone do a set? What are some questions someone can ask themselves that they would know whether they have self-passion or not? Because you ask everybody, the people that most people would be like, well, of course I’ve got passion. I’ve got passion. I mean, I have passion. I mean, you know, every Saturday night there at the house, we got a little passion going. I mean, what are you talking about? So do you have some, like, some, I mean, like you, perfect example in the intro or before the show started, you were talking about 31 times you’ve been rejected by your first book, Traction, which put you on the map, which is huge. It’s more than 30. And so that’s the definition of passion. You had to go to your 30s. I mean, how many people would have given up after 10? Most people. 15, 20, 25. Most people would have given up. Most people. And so what are some other little things you have seen that kind of help define passion? Because I think a lot of people think they want to be an entrepreneur, but they don’t really have their head wrapped around whether they have the right stuff or not. Does that make sense? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I’ll give you a couple of thoughts. I’ll just kind of riff a little bit, and in here will be a few nuggets. And so, you know, first of all, it’s what gets your blood pumping? What gets you out of bed every morning? What is the dent you want to put in the universe? What is the legacy you want to leave? Not everyone has an answer to that. I would suggest that most people aren’t passionate. I’ll split the difference and say half are and half aren’t. When you ask that series of questions and make that series of statements that I made, half the world’s looking at you scratching their head, there’s really nothing they’re totally passionate about. With that said, it doesn’t always have to be necessarily business-focused, but we’re talking about entrepreneurs, so there are people that are passionate about sports, and maybe they’ll never start a business around that. That’s a whole different ballgame than this ballpark that we’re in around entrepreneurship. That’s a good point. Now you point out the essential trait number three, is you have to be a problem solver. You have to create a problem, problem solving, setbacks, optimist. I mean, when you guys took over Regent Bank, which at the time when you guys bought it, it was called the Bank of Nowata. They just rebranded right before you bought it, as a matter of fact. And all banks pretty much lend money from the government, am I correct? You know, at the end of the day, banks rent money to people. Correct. That’s one way to say it. It’s oversimplified, though. You know what I mean? You get some money from the FDIC, you rent the money to other people, whatever. So there’s a lot of regulations there. And there’s a lot of bankers I run into who say, you just can’t grow a bank in today’s economy. Now, you guys bought the bank headed right after you bought the bank the recession happened. Yeah, good timing. Right. But a lot of people would have just given up, Z. So I want to get Gino’s take on this. Gino, I want to get your take on this. Problem solvers. I see a lot of people that aren’t entrepreneurs, they get overwhelmed by problems and they just go cry. We’re entrepreneurs are inspired to take action. Talk to me about the problem solving trait that you write about in your book. Yeah, and you described it pretty darn good there. And remember, we’re talking about traits that you’re born with. And so as your listeners, and they’re thinking, you know, they’re scanning their body right now with each one of these traits we’re talking about and saying, you know, am I a problem solver? Do I have this trait? Well, you just have to look at your life and look at your history. And the way you’ll know this is, you know, have you always been kind of a creative problem solver? Do you tend to see solutions where other people are seeing problems? Do you love solving problems? When you get hit with a setback, do you tend to lean into it? Are you more of an optimist by nature? And if all of those things are yes, yes, yes. As you look back with every little bump and hurdle you’ve run into, then odds are you are probably a problem solver and you probably have this trait. Z, again, I see a lot of people that are overwhelmed by problems. At the optometry clinic, I mean, we’ve been dealing with the shutdown. You’ve been dealing with… We actually had a peaceful protest where I would say 85% of the people that I could tell seemed to be very peaceful. Then you had 15% you had the Yahoo friends that showed up right in front of your optometry clinic. I know we were all over the news. Right in front of the mall. The news was out there. It was crazy. I mean, how do you process solving problems? Do you tend to hide a lot? Do you jump right into solving problems? How do you handle it? Oh, I love solving problems. I mean, I think that, you know, when Geno was talking, I mean, he was like reading my mail. I mean, obviously, I mean, you have to have that thing of… And that’s what bothers me right now with the current status. So many people are talking about the problem, and every time I hear that, I just want to scream at them and go, what’s the solution? What’s your solution? How are you going to fix it? What are you suggesting? I mean, we get it. We have a problem. Okay, enough. Now, let’s work on solutions. I have a pro tip. I have the hypothesis, I have the belief, that we’ll probably get hit by the train. And I believe if we keep our economy shut down, the economy will probably stay shut down. This is my take, this is my pro tip. This just in. This just in. So I think we should hit the open button, but that is my controversial take on that, Z. Well, I think, you know. Yeah, let me give you, let me throw one more thing in the mix. This will be a great indicator as to whether your listener has this trade. I’m thinking of the leadership teams I work with. Three to seven people running a company, we’re locked in the room. Well, my very entrepreneurial leadership teams, when we’re in that full-day session and they’re staring at that white issues, they get motivated, energized, and just attack that list. Where my teams that are not entrepreneurial, they look at that list of issues and the energy goes out of the room and they’re exhausted and they’re scared. And so, when you get energized looking at a list of issues, pretty good sign that you’re a problem solver. There you go. See, I tell you what, I was overwhelmed. I was looking at the questions for today’s show that we put together. Because one, when I read Gino Whitman’s book, I recognized two things were happening. One, he is smarter than I am. Two, I recognized that I probably need to stop talking into the box fan, and I probably need to start writing some questions as a result of reading this great book. Well, you see, that’s why you’re a problem solver. I was just sitting there looking into that fan, Lord. It took you a little while to get going, but you finally… I was overwhelmed. You geared down, though, and you got her done. I read the book. I went through it. Okay, so we talk about the essential trait number five of being an entrepreneur. Did we skip four? I’m skipping. Come on. We can’t give them all, Jim. I can’t give them all away. I can’t. I’ll skip number five, and I’ll move to essential trait number six. I’ll do that. Wow. Oh, my gosh. Sorry, drivers. Essential trait number six, risk taker, don’t freeze, rebellious, willing to fail. What are you talking about, Mr. Gino Wickman? Yeah, and so this one is a good one from a standpoint of when we’re talking entrepreneurship and someone sees this trait, they’re thinking that the risk we’re talking about is the risk of starting a business, of taking the entrepreneur elite, when truth be told, that’s one of a thousand risks you’re going to take over the next 10 years building your company. And so risk taking is the fact that you don’t freeze when it comes time to make a tough decision. And so being an entrepreneur is all about tough decisions every day, every week, every month, every year. And you lean into that decision. You make that tough call. A risk taker tends to be rebellious in nature and so you’re the kind of person that a stop sign is kind of a suggestion to you. You’re willing to fail, you don’t intend to fail, but you’re willing to. You know that that’s part of the game and then you tend to err on the side of begging for forgiveness than asking for permission. So if that describes you out there, then you probably have this trait of risk taker. Z, I gotta tell you this. Can I tell you my pro tip? He mentioned that I’m a terrible driver. Oh, you’re the worst. He mentioned that you’re an entrepreneur if you perceive a stop sign to be potentially a suggestion. Gino, I would like to confess to you a pro driving tip that I have been busted on on two occasions. No ticket. Thank you to the officer. What I’ll do is I call it the… Gino, did you play basketball? You play basketball? I did not. Okay. Well, Magic Johnson made this big up there in Michigan. It’s the no-look pass, right? So what I do is if the traffic is where I don’t want it to be, what I’m going to do is I’m going to signal, and I’m going to go into the parking lot of the gas station and look as though I’m looking for, like, am I looking for gas? I think I want gas. You know those people who look for gas, but then they go, no, no, the gas is two cents cheaper four miles away. Sure. I act like I’m that guy. So I’m like, oh, I know, I’ll keep going. And I look away, but the whole time I know where I’m going. I’m cutting through that parking lot. Oh yeah. But I look away, it’s a no look. It’s a no look drive. And I’ve been pulled over twice for this move. And the one time the officer pulled me over, woo woo, it’s in a Hummer with the Kim Jong Un wrap on it. Oh, it’s beautiful. And he says, do you recognize you’re driving a Hummer with Kim Jong Un wrapped on the side of it, and I see you do this often.” And I’m going, doing what? He says, the thing where you act like you’re going to get gas, and then you don’t get gas. I’m like, I’m indecisive. And he’s like, get out of here. Stop doing that. That happened. That was a thing. That was a thing. So anyway, that’s the move. I also do the shoulder move, Z. Whenever, you know it snows, Gino, does it snow a lot up in your region of Detroit, or are you in the snow-free zone of Detroit? Oh, it snows. It snows. I grew up in Minnesota, and you know how snow rules happen? Once it snows, people all of a sudden are like, you know, stoplights are kind of a suggestion now, because it’s snowing. Gino, does that happen up in Detroit, when it snows several feet or several inches? Do you have snow rules? It doesn’t get that deep, so no. I’ve never heard of that, so I have to say no to that. Well, Z, we’ll educate Gino. In Oklahoma, we have snow rules here. When it snows, even an inch, people are going, well, I might not be able to come to a full stop, so I’m just not going to try to stop. So you just drive right through the red light if there’s no other cars, and I’ve been busted doing that move with an inch of snow. Woo-woo! In a Hummer. In a Hummer. The snow is a powerful amount of snow. He said, sir, do you know why I pulled you over? I went through a red line. Why did you do that? A powerful amount of snow. A lot of momentum. I’m going like 20 miles an hour. I got out of that too because I was funny. Okay, we continue. Now we know about the traits of an entrepreneur, but some people want to learn more about this book. Where can they buy the book, or where can they learn more about your book if they want to get into all the essential traits? Yes, well, all major retailers certainly, but the epicenter of all things entrepreneurial leap is my website, edas.com. I’m a big believer in the idea of the entrepreneurial leap. I’m a big believer in the idea of the entrepreneurial leap. I’m a big believer in the idea of the entrepreneurial leap. I’m a big believer in the idea of the entrepreneurial leap is my website e-leap.com. You can certainly order it through the site. That will take you to the major retailers, but there’s also nine free tools, a lot of robust content that is free there on that website as well. Now in your book, you talk about eight critical mistakes that entrepreneurs make. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to tee up a mistake. I’m going to tee up one of your mistakes, and then Z, after we interview you about it, Z is going to chime in with maybe a funny story about this. So, Gino, tell us about this. Mistake number one, not having a vision. An entrepreneur opens up a business, they clearly don’t have a vision. Why is this such a big mistake? Yeah, so it’s a mistake due to lack of clarity, lack of communication, chaos. And so what you typically have is you’ve built this organization to a certain size where there’s just no clarity. Everybody joins you because they fell in love with your passion, you wrangled them in, and everyone is just not aligned around a vision. To the degree you have a vision, you will align everyone around that vision, you will get there faster, you will solve issues quickly, and you’ll weed out a person or two that’s really not in alignment with your vision. Zohan, you’re an optometrist. You know you know my wife is a beautiful lady She started working for you at the age of 18 years old yes, and I Dated her creepy boyfriend came around right and I was able to wrangle her away We’ve been married now 20 years, but you have your way. You know that was you were the creepy boyfriend. Oh, I’m sorry Here’s the thing you though have helped me out for years you have given my wife a wrong prescription You are an optometrist. Oh, yeah, we made sure what? Once we saw you a blur that’s like you said you should be in 2020 now ma’am. She’s about 2100 right now I have on a good day. What’s the danger of not having a vision you see business guys all the time not having a vision Well, it kind of cracks me up Sometimes a guy will and I see this over and over over he’ll open He’ll have he’ll have a little bit of a vision open up his business and then quick. I don’t know if he bores I don’t know if she bores I don’t know what next thing you know they went from having a donut shop to now they’re gonna sell you know sundry goods in the in the over here in the foyer and then they’re gonna they’re gonna open up a med spa welcome to Al behind you welcome to Al’s garage and med spa and med spa donuts and sundries sundries you want to take a shower we have a shower unit now available and a gym and I did Jim out back will open up anything you think you need I know up here. I know a guy’s the name of our store I know a guy calm I they just keep rolling the other ideas and just what do you think they got something kind of settled In they’re settled. I just seem so unsettled. You know, it’s like Nixon, you know, they’re there. They’re trying to do something else You’re like dude, just just stay in your lane and do what you were doing and do it with excellence, you know I mean do you affect that before you want to buy a replica of Ronald Reagan, because we sell those too. We have a clay model or one of those 3D printers. It’s unbelievable. It’s out in the back. I know a guy. I tell you what, you prop it up in your house, you dig a 3D Reagan. You see people like this, I’m sure, because you’ve done consulting and speaking and coaching. You’ve interacted with entrepreneurs for years. Do you see that, where the entrepreneur just keeps adding on one more idea while never gaining traction with any idea? Oh, for sure. I’m sitting here laughing because you’re spot on and then you’re dipping into mistake number six which is not staying true to your core. Oh there we go. That’s exactly what happens. They start you know trying to sell and be all things to all people and get away from what brought them and unfortunately they tend to go out of business or at least struggle and flatline forever. So mistake number one is not having a vision. Mistake number six is not staying true to your core. This just in. This just in from our home office. I see that a lot, a lot with politicians. I see that a lot with business owners. Politicians though are the easiest ones to spot usually because they’re like, I am in favor of capitalism. I’m down. This is me talking about it. I love it. I love it, Zeke. Free market. I know. You buy things. Get me to the capital because I love capitalism. Yeah. But now that I’ve been elected, I could see the merits of socialism and that’s what I’m going to do. Yeah. I mean, should we all share? You see that a lot. And we all see it. It’s the pressure that makes you clarify your vision. Now mistake number two, hiring the wrong people. Gino, have you ever hired the wrong person, ever? I have. In my first business, that’s where I learned it and I got really good at solving that problem and did not make that mistake again in the second business. Have you ever hired a person that had a magnificent resume and really, really was confident in their skills, but they ended up not being what you thought they were? Gene, have you ever interviewed the really good interviewing guy with the really white teeth and the great resume? It’s like a polished resume, it’s leather bound, his dad is a senator, and then he’s just a disaster. Have you ever hired that guy? Too many times. Well, I interviewed that guy. Fortunately, I was smart enough not to hire him most of the time, but definitely made that mistake a handful of times. The leather resume, that was a tip. This is actually an audio tape, Z, of I think one of Geno’s worst hires early on in his career. Really? Give me a second. How’d you get that tape? Let me wrangle it up real quick. How’d you get that tape? Well, and then actually, no, that’s right. This is Gino’s personal assistant interviewing one of his worst hires. Gino, I’m going to play about 45 seconds of it, and then you can tell me if this was the actual audio. Because I’d never know. You have so many. Who are we to vet the audio clips before we play them? Here we go. Right. Good call. Here we go. This guy interviewed well. with our acquisition of average joe’s so far yeah, there’s a lot to do over there so i should probably get back that is a really interesting painting oh thank you, yeah that’s me taking the bull by the horns that’s how i handle my business, it’s a metaphor i get it that actually happened though alright so have you ever hired a guy like that? And what do you do for the listeners out there who’ve hired somebody who they thought they’d be the great the greatest manager ever They claim to read the dictionary in their free time. They claim to literally take the bull by the horns They bring their brain. They bring in their own paintings of them doing so what do you do when you’re stuck with that guy? Oh, wrong clip. But if you do get stuck with them, you’re never stuck with them. And I think that’s the takeaway. How do you fire people in Detroit? What do you do? What’s the move? Go ahead. Yeah, well, here’s what I would suggest, because that’s the easy part. The way that this dynamic shows up, for anyone thinking about taking their entrepreneurial leap, is what tends to happen is that entrepreneur starts their business, reaches some level of success, sells a few things, generates some revenue, and they need a body, and so they grab the closest body to them, which is their brother, sister, significant other, mom, dad, aunt, uncle, throw them into the business, business continues to grow, and they keep doing that, and two, three, five years into it, they find themselves surrounded by a bunch of people that really shouldn’t be there. And so the point is, you’ve gotta hire people that have your core values, hire people that have the skill set to do the job, slow hire, quick fire. And so, once you realize you’ve got the wrong one, the firing part is easy, assuming they’re at-will employees. And we’re not going to get into the legality of that, but the firing part is easy. It’s avoiding that mistake on the front end that almost every entrepreneur makes. Now, mistake number three, not spending time with your people. I think a lot of people believe in abdication, not delegation. They get it confused. They hire somebody who’s the golden… See, this guy’s the… He is the golden baby. Oh, this guy. You look at him, you say, this guy’s going to be the golden baby. And your partner says, the golden baby? No, this will be… Look at the golden baby. I don’t even know what that means. Why are you saying… I’ll tell you, he’s the golden baby. He’s the chosen one. And then you put them in a room and you don’t train the golden baby. And you wonder why he’s not getting it done. Talk to me about this. Why can’t you just hire a golden baby and not train him? Hence the name, Goldmember. So I have no idea where you’re going with that, but here’s what this is saying. Thanks to two of us. Is the hard-charging entrepreneur with this idea, again, builds a company with people. And these mistakes all stem from my clients when they come to me, somewhere between 10 and 250 employees, having made all of these mistakes, and we’re correcting these mistakes. And the number one issue I and we hear every single time is communication. And communication is just simply the root of it, is that entrepreneur is not spending time with their people. The formula and remedy is a simple solution. It’s meeting with your team weekly, meeting with your team quarterly, and giving feedback often. That will solve 90% of your communication issues overnight. Do you have to schedule an actual meeting with your team on a consistent basis, maybe the weekly meetings and those quarterlies, or do you recommend entropy and just sort of having an apathetic look at the world and just seeing if we drift into a meeting at the same time and place? We 100% prescribe same day, same time, same agenda every single week and every single quarter. Oh, can you say that one more time? I blacked out. It was so good. Say it one more time, please. We highly recommend it. We actually, every client does this. Every meeting has got to be same day, same time, same agenda, every single week, every single quarter. That right there is so profound because, you know, I’ve been doing consulting now since 2006, and I can tell you, nothing is more frustrating, Z, than playing phone tag with a successful person because they don’t answer a number if they don’t know who it is. Right. Or they’re always doing something productive with their time. So you miss them. They don’t check voicemails. They call you back from their mysterious bat line and you don’t answer the phone because you don’t know the numbers. And it just goes round. And if you ever played an epic game of phone tag. Oh, yes. Oh, it’s just so fun. It just kills. I love having the weekly meeting at the same time every week. Now your meetings don’t go on for four hours or nine hours. Gino, how long is the longest we should possibly have a weekly meeting? Ninety minutes every week, max. Not a minute more. You can’t solve every issue. You just need to solve the most important ones, and the rest will wait until next week’s meeting. Okay. Now, again, this stuff we’re covering right now is in your newest book. This is a great book, but your legendary book, Traction, is also available. Talk to me about this mistake number four, which is not knowing who your customer is. Does that mean you’re allowing people to buy things from you and you don’t recognize their face? What does it mean when you say, not knowing who your customer is? The issue here is that entrepreneur, that business, is taking a buckshot approach to selling their wares. And so your marketing efforts, your sales efforts, your branding efforts, they’re just kind of, like I said, taking that buckshot approach and doing a drag net and dragging in whatever they can when the remedy is knowing the demographic, geographic, psychographic, who they are, where they are, what they are, how they think, and targeting your sales and marketing efforts on them so that you have a very focused effort and you maximize all of your resources, time, energy and money. Can we talk more about golden babies? I think we should. I wish you would. Can you hear this ladies and gentlemen? It’s gold members! Do you put golden diapers on your head? I have pro tips. Can I give you some tips? Gino, I’ve had some, for about a decade I think, I’ve wanted to interview Gino Wickman here. This is sort of an answer to prayer. And so, Gino, I have some pro tips I want to give you, and feel free not to implement them. It’s fine. He’s doing well. Things are going well here. I mean, apparently. I think he’s doing all right. So feel free to one-up me, but these are my tips. Okay. One, I think moving forward you should insist that people introduce you as Gino Wickman. Wickman. Isn’t that a sound? I think it’s hot. And I think if you become the kind of man that would correct people that say Wickman. You go, for example, you met me for the first time today, and I would say, Geno Wickman, pleasure to meet you. And you could say, no, no, no, it’s Wickman. It’s like Prince, where Prince had that constant friction with everyone, because people were like, hey, good to see you, Prince. And he’s like, no, it’s a symbol. You see what I’m saying, Z? Think about that. It’s hot. It’s hot sauce. Oh, yeah, I’m writing it down as you speak. I’m not. This could really create not traction, but friction. Not be silly, but I think you have traction with that. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Your newest book could be called Friction, Keys to the Golden Baby. I like that. What do you think about that? What do you think? Friction. People would go, he’s written three books, four books, it doesn’t make sense. Kind of like when you get a baby and they spray paint it gold and they take a picture of it on the cover. I don’t think that’s hard. How many books have you written at this point, Gino? This is number six. So if you wrote Friction, the Golden Baby, people would buy it almost like a mercy purchase. They’re like, it’s like some of Prince’s music got kind of weird there for a while. And people are going, I don’t know if I even like this music, but it’s packaged in a glass sphere of some kind. So I’m going to buy the Golden Baby. I’m going to drop that down a notch, Gino. Clay always shoots, he’s always swinging for a grand slam every time. Me, I’m good with base hits. You’re a benevolent man. You’re a kind of person. So I think instead of doing a whole book cover on that, I challenge you in your next book to somewhere in there, get the phrase, Golden Baby. Somewhere in the book. Golden Baby. Golden Baby. We’ll know it’s for us. That’s your challenge. It’ll be just a little love nugget, and we’ll have her shed a tear, we’ll probably pop some champagne and she goes, we’re somebody now. You can use it in your perfect level 10 meetings. In your level 10 meetings, you can just kind of say, now guys, as an example, a golden baby would do this. All right, we continue. So, Gino Wick, when you talk about your mistake number five, is not charging enough. As an example, you didn’t charge us enough to have to put up with the personal hell of being on this show. Talk to me about not charging enough. That’s a good point. Excellent point. Yeah, so the classic mistake here is undercharging for your services. And so it’s literally a psychological issue. It’s an insecurity. And so almost every entrepreneur, when they take their leap, for some reason they charge less than they should. And most startups, they’re literally a 10% price increase from being profitable or having a loss. That’s a good word. And so there’s two great disciplines here. First of all, there’s a great TED talk by Casey Brown who goes right to the psychology of this. But number two, Dan Sullivan, one of my mentors, talks about when you’re pricing, think about the number that scares you the most, and then add 20%. And that will force you to kind of break through that insecurity. But it’s just a common, classic entrepreneurial mistake, and it’s the difference between staying in business and going out of business. And Gino, I want to add to that. I want to pile on. The other thing, too, is the drift. In other words, you know, cost goes up you keep your your We’re here. We’re here. We just did a bomb. Can you hear me? Um, what I was saying is can you hear me? Gino? Hello, Gino. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. No, you know you there. No, you know, I’m calling you back He’s still there he’s still there he’s there this is a fake he’s there Yeah, I think golden babies. Hey, are you back back? Oh, I knew you offended him when you were talking about that Golden Babies thing. I know. Okay, continue. I thought he was going to hang up on you any moment. I knew it. Passive aggressive. Bam. But I was piling on Gino, and that is not only day one do you get aggressive and you price things accordingly, but also you have to watch the drift. In other words, there’s a restaurant here in Tulsa, true story, and they had the best lasagna in town, and they had it priced accordingly. And then every time they got a new chef in there, he’d be like, I can make this thing a little better, a little bit more meat, a little more chili, a little more bears, a little bigger peas. You know, pretty soon, they didn’t realize, but what they were charging for the lasagna was actually less than what it cost them to make the lasagna. And everybody loved the lasagna. That’s why you went to the restaurant. It’s as good as a Gino Wittman book. I tell you what, that lasagna is so good. I tell you what, I can’t make it for that. I don’t know how they do it. I mean, this is crazy. They must buy in bulk or something. I don’t know. This is the best. I want six orders to go, too. It’s not profitable, but I want a lot of them. I want a lot. Let’s make a lot of them. And I guess it’s kind of like the truck driver that says, I lose $1,000 on every run. They go, what are you going to do about that? He goes, well, I’m just going to get more trucks. I’ll make it up. Gino, this is a problem for people. Pricing is a huge problem. Exactly right. That’s why I’m calling it out before you take your entrepreneur at least so you don’t discover it five years in. Now, Gino, do you charge money for your services? I do. Unethical. How did you figure out? It’s unethical. He’s a pirate. He’s a pirate. He’s out there plundering people. He said, I’m going to make a profit in exchange for goods and services that I offer. I have a lot of people, Sean Copeland swears by your program. Pesh Patel swears by the program. Are you still doing the thing where you work with people for free forever? What’s your hot offer over there? No, that’s unfortunately not my business model. Do people out there want to hire you? What do they do? What’s the process look like? Are you even available at this point? Because your books have sold just so many copies. Yeah, unfortunately I’m not available, but the good news is we have 374 other EOS implementers that are available all over the world. So I can connect you to any one of them, certainly. Okay, now let’s talk about this mistake mistake number. I’m gonna go with mistake number seven I got some other questions I want to get into mistake number seven not knowing the numbers a lot of people they go I have a great product. Whoa great lasagna. Whoa, that’s the golden baby. Whoa, and then they say I Don’t know if I make any money talk to me about the dangers of not knowing your numbers Yeah here here and sadly somebody that has all six essential traits typically is not great with numbers. It’s actually a weakness of most visionary entrepreneurs. And so the beauty is it’s a very simple remedy because what’s happening is these companies are flying blind, going with their gut, guessing that everything’s going fine. The way you solve that, three simple things. Number one is look at the 5 to 15 most important numbers every single week. Number two, look at a monthly P&L every single month. And number three, manage a budget projected to actual every month. And if you don’t know what those three things are, just implement it and you’ll figure it out in about two months. You know what I’m going to do here, Z, is I’m going to cue up. There’s that show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Who Wants to be a Millionaire? And it kind of creates a suspenseful atmosphere. I’m going to cue up the music here. And what I’m going to do is we’re going to come in rapid fire with questions for you, Gino, OK? We’ve got about 10 questions from Thrivers all over the nation. All over. And I’m going to fire out the question, and if you can give us the shortest, most concise answer possible, are you ready for the lightning round, sir? Ready. OK, let me cue it up. Let me try. Let me try. I’m kidding. It’s intense Here we go. All right. I think this is the right music. Here we go question number one When consulting with a business owner, how frequently do you need to have the awkward talk with them? That the how often do you have to have an awkward talk with them when consulting with business owners? Every single session in the first year. Really? Every single session. OK, I got my music ready. Here we go. Next question. This is from a lady by the name of Amelia. What do you tell business owners who get bored easily, the ones that cannot commit to doing the same things day after day, week after week? What do you tell them? Get good at it. Learn how to have fun with it. Stay focused. OK, question number three from Luke writes, what do you say to clients that get stuck on website edits, updates that don’t matter, products that they don’t sell, things that don’t matter? What do you say to clients like that? That one stumped me because that one seems obvious. Pull your team together, decide what needs to go, decide what needs to stay, make quick decisions and go forward. Where can people learn more? We have a listener who writes, where’s the best place for our listeners to learn more about your level 10 meetings? Two places, purchase the book Traction or go to EOFWorldwide.com. Z, get ready for your tough questions. He likes to ask inappropriate political, geopolitical, religious questions, so get ready for that. Here we go. Here we go. Next question. This comes in from Sean. Sean writes, what would you say to a business owner that does not yet see the value of accountability when working with a consultant such as the EOS team? Well, number one, I wouldn’t work with you because accountability is the foundation of the relationship with all of my clients and I fear for your future and your people if you don’t believe in accountability. Next question from a Thriver by the name of Sean writes, can you talk about the process of training business owners to prioritize the stuff that matters as opposed to focusing on the things that don’t matter like a golden baby? So the approach that we take and I take is we work with the owner and their leadership team. And so those are the three to seven people at the helm of the organization and together those three to seven people need to list all of their priorities and then choose the top three to seven for the next 90 days and don’t walk out of the room until you 100% agree on what those three to seven priorities are. Andrew writes what happens when an employee does not do their action items after your level 10 meeting when it’s time for the follow-up two weeks in a row. What say you, Gino Wickman? Rule of thumb, 90% of all to-do should be complete every week. If you have an employee that doesn’t do that, you sit them down, have a conversation, and that is strike one. If it happens again, you sit them down, have another conversation, that is strike two. If it happens again, that is strike three, and you’ve got an epidemic, and it’s time to make a people change. Julia writes, how do you equip implementers? Or how do you personally navigate the emotions of an artist slash expert entrepreneur that thinks they know it all but does nothing? Well, that one’s a little more difficult. So we’re able to solve that, and I’m able to solve that probably half the time. Some mini interventions, some group therapy in the session with the leadership team. The other half of the time it’s a deep psychological issue that stems back to when they were seven years old and they need about seven years of therapy before they’re ready to ultimately solve that issue. Oof. Oof. Z, it’s time for you to ask your offensive questions as you often do. Z, your questions… Z is known to ask questions that are so offensive that our listeners, our guests will just hang up. You know, Z, it’s happened. I mean, we don’t have any audio of it. It has? Well, we don’t have any audio of it. I mean, in theory, it could have happened. It could have happened. I know. Okay, go ahead and ask any questions you want about Geno Weckman, America’s golden baby of consulting. Geno, if you could go back, if you could get in the time machine, the DeLorean, go back 20 years and have a meeting with yourself. If it could turn back time, turn it… Okay. What would you say to yourself? Oof. Oof. You said oof? What would I say to myself? Yes. I would say to myself, let your freak flag fly. Whoa. Lower your guard. Be 100% you and don’t apologize for it. I love that. So you know what I would say to my younger self? You want to hear? I pre-recorded it for today’s show. I should probably return that. I don’t know what I would say to my younger self. You know what they say, see a broad to get that booty ackle? Lay her down and smack him yackle. That’s what I would say. That’s about 20 years ago. That was about you. Okay, two more questions for Gino Wickman. Gino, Wickman, America’s golden baby of consulting. What’s next for you, Gino? Are you on a beach somewhere in the winter? On the beaches of Detroit. I mean, probably a snowbird. I mean, what’s next for you? Are you buying the Lions? You’ve got a beach house, you’re building a big beach house somewhere in the Caribbean. You can’t tell us the exact location. And you’re ordering a bunch of umbrellas for your drinks and all that kind of stuff. What’s next? Yeah, far from riding off into the sunset, I’ve got many decades of work left to do, but this next 10 years is focused on entrepreneurial leap and impacting one million entrepreneurs in the making over the next 10 years. I love that. That’s awesome, buddy. And if you say, listen, have you picked a time in the future where you say, you know what, that’s my goal, and when I hit that age, I am rolling up the sleeves, peace and out, saying, see you later, alligator. Far from it. So this next 10-year goal will take me to 60, and then there will be another 10-year goal at 60, and another one at 70, and another one at 80, until I keel over. I’m going to die in the middle of a project. I love that. Okay, my question I have for you, this is the one I sincerely want to know the answer to, because this is one that I get asked this question so much by our listeners. They want to know, Geno Wickman, how do you organize the first four hours of your day? What time do you get up, and how do you organize the first four hours of your day? Because you’re a very productive man. How do you do it? My advice to the world is, when you go to bed, go to bed knowing your plan for the next day. Do not go to sleep without knowing your plan for the next day. And so what I do somewhere between 5 o’clock and 11 o’clock is lay out my next day. So when I wake up I hit the ground running as opposed to what most people do getting distracted by emails, phone calls, etc. and let the world take over. And so those first four hours, you know, I wake up at various times. It’s not always the same time, but I wake up. I typically have a morning routine, which is some thinking, writing, and some light exercise. And then I hit the ground running with whatever that first item is on my list. My days are very, what’s the word I’m looking for? Very, each day is a bit different. Some days I have a session, some days I’m doing podcasts like this, but whatever that first thing is on my schedule, I attack that first and work my way through my plan for the day. What’s the average time you wake up? On average I would say 6.30. 6.30, that’s a fair time. You have it at 6.30. Do you talk to a lot of people during those first hours of your day? Or do you take more of this you time? Yeah, I’m always scheduling my calls during drive time. So if I’m in the car at 7.30, I’ve got a call or two scheduled for that drive time. Gino, I appreciate you being on the show so much, and I encourage every listener out there to check out your new book, The Entrepreneurial Leap. Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? I really do appreciate you making the poor life choices needed to end up on today’s show, and I just really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was a blast. You guys are absolutely nuts, but it was a true blast. We are flying the freak flag. And listen, whenever you get that package delivered from probably UPS or I don’t know, FedEx, open it quickly because it’s probably going to have a golden baby in there. So just… Golden… So leave that on the porch door. We went to the golden baby statue store. It’s an extension of… Is that going to be a live one? I thought you were going to say live golden baby. It’s an extension of Z’s optometry clinic. It’s off in the back There’s a room where he sells the golden babies Thank You Gino, thank you guys and now without any further ado Why does this still keep happening to me? I don’t know whose prayer I’m breaking into, but I’m breaking into somebody’s prayer, saying, Lord, why do I keep going through the same things over and over again? You will always go back to being who you were before because you have never changed your mind. You change your friends, you change your address, you change your phone number, you change the songs you sing, you change everything else but you didn’t change your mind. Nothing is powerful as a changed mind Boom! Nothing is powerful as a changed mind Boom! Better get yours cause I’ma take mine Boom! Leave em where they got it, they ain’t ready Used to have a lot of homies, now they drop it like a belly I went boom! We taking over, it’s our time now Boom! Oh you ain’t know, we about to thrive now Big, overwhelming, optimistic, momentum, eighth place Hey! Back, flex, get em, go get em, babe Hurdle every obstacle, tryna do the impossible Turned my whole life around, haters thought it was comical Had to make some moves, didn’t mean it, seen nothing Quarterback to play, man, I had to call an auto-pick Drop back, stop back, rearrange or twist it up Only got one life, but then it’s best if you go dip it up Bet you ain’t an option, ain’t no way that I can give it up Hey, now let’s go and pick it up Nothing like your posse, look poppy, you cannot top me They watchin’ me and try to copy like Rocky, you cannot stop me Colder than ever, we grindin’ off on the weather We shinin’ because we better get with us, we boutta challenge I’m like, boom! We taking over, it’s our time now, boom! Oh, you ain’t know, but we about to thrive now, Big overwhelming optimistic old gentlemen, Hey, Clay, hey, hey, let me give it, give it. Came a long way from where I used to wait, I used to call me the C like the way I used to sweat, Cold habits die hard, but you gotta label man, If they ain’t riding like the Harley-D, you don’t need them, You’re cheering and you’re clapping, I don’t need that, Fake friends treat them like facts, yo, make a lean back, Sight for no vision, makes you blind I can see that anything I think of in my mind I can achieve that Hey, I can make a million if I want to I’ma keep it real cause I want to Other women tryna holla, girl I won’t choose And disrespecting white people’s what I won’t do Go and do your dance, go and do your dance If you really wanna change, gotta have a plan Even when they sit down, I’ma take a stand Throw your hands up, say it with me, you already know it man Thoughts become your thoughts, thoughts become your actions So be intentional about the way you’re passion It’s focused, there’s no hocus pocus We only live once man, and you know this You can’t press the rewind, but you can make a beeline To the next level like you’re headed for the treeline I was born in Minnesota, moved to Oklahoma Incorporated, built into my rhymes Now it’s time to show ya how a former stuttering student Can turn up the raps with a lyrical miracle flow In the cash to match, yeah I’m important A Minnesota refugee, but I’m consistent as can be as I rap on hip-hop beats Bringin’ rappers some tax, even though that I’m white I can play that folkin’ music for an infinite of ice Here we go, here we go, here we go, full steam 3, 2, 1, dynamite on the scene Boom! Nothing is powerful as a changed mind Boom! Better get yours, cause I’ma take mine Boom! People, boy, they got a thing ready Used to have lotta homies, now they droppin’ like a belly I’m like, boom! We takin’ over, it’s our time now. Boy, you ain’t know, we about to thrive now. Big, overwhelming, optimistic, momentum, boom. And the Lord sent me here to tell you, the problem is with your default. Until you change your phone number, you change the songs you sing, you change everything else but you didn’t change your mind. There is nothing as powerful as a changed mind. Hear the rest of T.D. Jakes incredible life-changing and mind-altering sermon nothing as powerful as a changed mind today by looking up T.D. Jakes on YouTube and typing in nothing as powerful as a changed mind. That is a biblical miracle rap. My name is Nick Holman I’m with Holman’s Custom Cabinets. I want to tell you about our Dream 100 marketing system that we started with Clay Clark through the coaching program. We’ve increased our repeat clients, our repeat builders that we work for, and we’ve got a lot more potential for growth since then. And it’s very scalable, and I’ve taken this young boy that I started this with, this 18 year old guy who is my dream 100 marketing guy who’s just making phone calls, taking donuts, taking cookies out to new contractors and clients to try to reach them to making repeat sales with them. And I had a lot of concerns just at first with trying to maybe train somebody to do this. We had a repeatable process, a script for him to call, and he’s doing that over and over. He calls anywhere from two to 300 people a week. It’s been over 3,000 calls since the first of the year, and sometimes he’s kind of switched over into sales because we had so many sales coming in that he had to help handle those sales and take away from the Dream 100 marketing because of that. We’ve been doing it about seven months. It took about two to three months for us to break even, to hit the break even point. And from the three to six month mark, three to seven months now, we’ve got a 300% return on my investment. I’m paying this young man, this 18 year old boy, a salary and then a 5% commission on these jobs. And he’s just literally been killing it. And we’ve increased our profit by 8%, increased our sales by 10%. And these are repeatable, most of them are repeatable clients. New contractors that I’m doing repeat business on. Some of them I’ve sold four to five jobs to since January when we started this. And it’s been a 335.6% return for this campaign. And we’ve spent a little over $30,000 and made over $100,000 in gross profits. But just this last week alone, this Dream 100 process, we sold right at $65,000 in sales just from this Dream 100 process. and I can’t explain enough how blessed, how much of a blessing it’s been and how well it works. I’d encourage you to start doing it soon. Thanks. All right, Thrive Nation, I know that a lot of you watching this show on a consistent basis or listening to the show have a business or have aspirations to grow a business. And if you’re not careful, your business can own you rather than you owning your business. You might find yourself at a place and space where you work all the time owning your business. You might find yourself at a place and space where you work all the time and you have no time freedom, although you earn financial freedom. And I know for anybody out there that’s never owned a business before, the idea of achieving financial freedom itself may be very exciting, but if you achieve financial freedom and you don’t have any time to enjoy that, the question is, what was the point? And so on today’s show, we’re gonna be joined here with an actual thriver, an actual long-time client who’s been able to achieve a time freedom to build a sustainable schedule that he loves and here to share the story is Nick Holman. Nick, welcome to the Thrived Time Show. How are you, sir? Thank you for having us. Hey, Nick, what’s your website for anybody out there who wants to verify you’re not a hologram? HolmansCabinets.com. H-O-L-M-A-N. Okay. HolmansCabinets.com? Yes, sir. And where are you based there, sir? We’re in Sparta, Tennessee. We cover the middle Tennessee area. And how long have you been in that area? We’ve been here nearly 40 years. My dad started the company when I was just a little kid. Awesome. And so did your dad kind of mentor you in the ways of cabinetry? He did. I grew up from a little kid doing the business. I didn’t plan on doing it. I didn’t want to, but it ended up that way and I really enjoy it. The Lord’s really blessed me. Now, how did you initially hear about us and what we do in terms of growing businesses? I was listening to a podcast called Entrepreneur on Fire and heard you interviewed on there and just sought you out. Well, you know, one thing that we’ve had a pleasure working with you on and something we’ve enjoyed is we here at the Thrive Time Show, we call them diligent doers is who we work with. People that frankly are hardworking and all they want to know is what do I need to do? The best way I would describe it or kind of analogous way would be if you’re going to the grocery store, we’ve all been to the grocery store where there’s somebody at the store who has no intention of buying anything. We’ve all been to the mall or we’ve seen somebody who doesn’t want to buy anything. They’re just hanging out. And there’s a lot of people that kind of view entrepreneurship like that. They’re entrepreneurs. And there’s other people that actually are entrepreneurs. They actually implement. We call those diligent doers. And Sean’s had the pleasure of working with you. Oh, yeah. And Sean, so tell us, tell listeners out there, what kind of big improvements have you and Nick worked together to implement within the company, Holman’s Cabinets.gov? Yeah. So we, I’ve actually had the pleasure of working with Nick for several months here, but he has worked with several different consultants in our program. So by the time I got to him, I’m just going, hey man, what is at this point, what is your biggest limiting factor? At the time he’s saying, I’m pretty close to this ideal schedule, but there’s about 15 hours on my schedule of stuff that I don’t feel like I can delegate, but I’m kind of stuck there. So it’s been probably three months or so, Nick, that we’ve been working at trying to get those hours off your schedule. It was more of a high-level task that we systemized week by week, working on training employees and refining the system itself, and that’s now resulted in Nick having that time back to use for other things. Now Nick, before we worked with you, how would you describe where the business was at? I was all over the place, very, very busy. I worked about 80 to 90 hours a week, never home, running, doing jobs, working late at night at home with my laptop, drawing cabinet jobs, quoting cabinet jobs, and just really had no free time whatsoever. And so now how would you describe your schedule versus how it was then? A little bit laid back. I’ve even found myself bored a time or two. And that doesn’t last long. I’ve always, always can find something to do. But I’m looking at other business ventures, which I’m into different things, and excited about that. And have a little bit more time with my family, of course. I love that free time. I’ve got four children, the Lord’s blessed me with, and some time to do ministry work that God’s allowed me to do. All of this is because of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I just thank Him, thank you all for the time that I’ve gotten back to be able to do that. It just frees up so much time, the time freedom. I don’t nearly need it financially, but the time is invaluable. So if you could describe for anybody out there that’s listening, what was the process like that kind of guided you through? What are some of the improvements that you’ve made in the business? The first thing y’all did, of course, was the website, and you started encouraging me to get Google reviews. We’re the highest rated cabinet shop in the state of Tennessee now. Come on now. It’s just been a blessing to see people call, and they say, well, I said, how do you find us? Well, we see your reviews, they’re just unbelievable, the video reviews. And then also me training, I guess the last few months is hiring and training new people. I did not think that I could ever get anyone to replace a lot of what I was doing and measuring and learning all the different options of cabinets, appliances, the different ins and outs on different houses, different ins and outs of different cabinet options with whether it was custom or prefab or semi-custom, all of those different things. I didn’t think I could train anyone and it’s been possible to do that. And now I’ve got two guys that are doing that. It’s just really relieved a lot of my time, the hiring, the group interviews, doing that has really been helpful, delegating and being able to train in writing down a process of how they can go through and learn what I’m doing. It answers a lot of their questions before they ever have to ask me with what we’ve written down the schedule and how they’re to do that. It’s just made it so much easier. Let’s talk about the branding for a second. When we first started working with you, did you already have a website in place or did our team have to help you with that? We did have a website. We redesigned it and made it much more Google canonical where Google could read it better. And of course, the reviews and all that, and you all are riding on the back of it all the time. And it’s been a lot more profitable when people look up our website. All over Nashville now, even in that, we’re almost two hours away. People call us all the time from Nashville, Brentwood, Franklin, and then even in our areas, it’s just constant because of our website. And before we start working with you, how many web leads would you get maybe in a given month versus how many are you getting now? I’ll look off the top of my head, I don’t know, but I know that, I don’t know, we’re getting on average eight to 10 a week. Now, I probably got one to two a week before. So maybe four or five times more leads? Yeah. Yeah, I was looking at the tracking sheet before we hopped on here, and it’s actually, this year, 34% of all of your leads have come from that. So that’s a significant amount, yeah. Now, what we try to do at the Thrive Time Show is for anybody out there that goes to thrivetimeshow.com and you click on the testimonials button, no exaggeration, I’m just going to show this here, we have over 2,000 client success stories on video. So if you go back and watch some of these people you’ll go, wow that was 10 years ago, wow that was five years ago, wow that was six years ago. The reason why we do that is a, it inspires confidence and potential buyers, somebody watching this show today might go, well, you know what? This seems credible. The second is we want to build the faith of an entrepreneur, not in a religious sense, in our biblical sense, but the faith they can do it. How has that aspect, the coaching or the mentorship, helped having somebody that is showing you, hey, this is a proven path. We’ve done it before. We’re going to do it again. We’ve been coaching clients since before search engine optimization was a big thing. Now we’re doing it that, you know, now that search engine is a big thing, we did it before social media was a big thing. Now that it is a big thing, we’re still doing it. How does it help? How has it helped you knowing that you’re following a proven path and not moving just off of guesswork? It’s been tremendous. Just having a plan, I can follow a plan if that plan’s laid out. And you could see that. I could see that with other people. You know, you had another cabinet shop that was doing the same thing, I think, in North or South Carolina, you were working with. I seen that, and I thought, I can do this. And then having that same plan from learning from y’all, taking that, the same thing, and being able to teach my guys in much the same way, and they’re picking up on it and learning it. And it’s just, it’s teaching one that’s teaching another and it’s just, it’s passing that along. It’s been tremendous. Now, we’ve worked on the online reputation, the online reputation enhancement, you know, gathering Google reviews, video reviews on your site. One thing that’s been nice, and I’ve heard about this through the coaches, is you guys do a good job and it turns out that matters. And I hate to say this, but I’ve worked with a lot of restaurants in the past, where when we start, we go in through the… I have a proven process I take people through. So if somebody schedules a 13-point assessment with me, I hop on the phone call with them, just like I did with you there, Nick. And I try to go over, okay, I want to ask them, what kind of revenue did you do last year? What kind of revenue did you do the year before? How would you rate your website on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best? How would you rate your branding? How would you rate your accounting? And we go through all these systems. And I’ve worked with a lot of restaurants who’ve said, you know, the one thing though, is our food’s terrible. And you know, so when people show up, they typically leave mad or upset. And you guys have always done a great job. And we would call that the quality control loop. And so when we go to your website here, you guys have gathered testimonials. How has having video testimonials from actual clients impacted you? When people call all the time, they say, your testimonials are unbelievable. That helps set us apart from all the other shops that don’t have that. I’m friends with a lot of the other shop owners. We do 10 times more than most shops around us. I think it’s due to the reviews, it’s due to the testimonials. They can look us up and see that we’re credible. Some of my workers came on board because of the reviews and they saw the credibility that we had among other people. And they wanted to be a part of the team because of the great work and the satisfied clients that we have. Now if we go to the bottom of your website, we do ongoing search engine optimization for you, which is kind of a big task that if we do it right, no one knows we’re doing it. It’s kind of like pulling the weeds in a garden. I see so many inspired patriots. They say, Clay, I planted a garden. I was so inspired by your wife. And then I’ll see them a couple months later and they’ll go, I’ll say, how’s the garden? They go, don’t talk about it. Didn’t weed it, didn’t feed it, it’s dead. Going with the rock garden, baby, a rock garden. So there’s ongoing pruning that has to, we have to run the online ads for you, manage that. We have to get the search engine going, the optimization, then we have to track what we’re doing on a weekly basis and track where we’re, how is tracking implemented you, just knowing that all these things are happening behind the scenes? Well, you can continually see where you’re at and what you need to improve on and what you’re doing well at and see how it’s growing. It’s just, I love the numbers. I love to see the numbers and see how you can track that and it just continues to increase or say, hey, I need to work here on this area because we’re having some problems in this area. And that helps you to see that and what you need to work on. And that’s what Sean’s really helped me to do each week. And he points those things out to me. And, but it’s easy to fix once you know what the issue is. But if you don’t know it, you don’t know what to do. You don’t know what to work on. Now, one thing that blew my mind years ago is I had a chance to interview the NBA Hall of Famer and fellow Christian, David Robinson. And David Robinson was jacked. And if you’re watching this show and you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m going to pull up this video here, pull up this photo. He was so jacked. He was, he was so physically fit. Do you remember this? Oh yeah, if you Google David Robinson, jacked. David Robinson just jacked. I mean, this guy just, oh, he was huge. And I remember talking to Dave off camera and then some on camera. I’m like, Dave, how did you know that it was time to retire? How did you know it was time to go? When did you know it was time to go ahead and retire? And he said, Clay, I was hitting the weights every day at the peak of my career. Every day. I’m in the gym, never cheating on my diet, following my diet, always hitting the weights, just… Those guns. You know, it’s the consistency. And it wasn’t that he had this super complicated workout program, it’s the consistency. And the Bible speaks to this a lot. It’s called Proverbs 10.4. For anybody out there that hasn’t read the Bible in a while, Proverbs 10.4 says, He who has a slack hand becometh poor, but the hand of the diligent maketh rich. And that’s the one thing that I have found over the years that I cannot really train. I can show, I can show people, but you know, today I woke up at three, I came into the office about 5.30 today after organizing my day, hopped into our staff meeting at six and every single day. Can you talk a little bit about the diligence of maybe having a coach, if that has helped you or as far as, or maybe your dad taught that to you, or just the consistency of putting in the work every day? Yeah, my dad did teach it to me. I wasn’t raised in church or anything like that. Literally, my dad worked seven days a week. We had a cattle farm with about, at one time, 500 head of cattle, the cabinet shop, and we had a tree nursery. So literally, dad worked us seven days a week. And so I grew up with that diligence and just have brought that into my work life, and I enjoy work. Work is fun. I’m very hyper and energetic, and I’m always doing something. My mind never shuts down, even so it’s hard to sleep sometimes. And so, just being a diligent doer, which is a biblical principle I’ve carried over into my work life, and even in other businesses, the Lord’s truly blessed because of that, but sometimes that can go the wrong direction too much if you’re too busy in the areas you don’t need to be in. All of this helps to organize that and to free up some time where you’re not too involved in that. I’ve been told all my life, you don’t have to spend so much time in work and you can balance that out. Well, this has helped me balance that out because there was no way I could have kept going the way I was and it ever worked out. It’s freed up so much of my time and allowed me to have really a more balanced life, be more biblical in my life as a husband and as a father, as a Christian, as a church member. It’s helped me to balance my life in every area. So it could be safe to say you’re getting, you know, five times more leads and working five times less? Yes, sir. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. That’s a pretty powerful success story. Now, have you guys started documenting all the checklists and systems on the back end of the website yet? Is that something you guys have tackled yet? No, no, but that’s something that’s coming right up here. Just getting them all organized on the website for the employees to be able to access those systems. Well, I would just say this, just housekeeping note, when we hop off here, maybe you guys can hop on a call real quick. I’d love to book a 13-point assessment with you, just to touch base on a few things, because what’s happening is a lot of our clients, I’ll just give the listeners an example. This would be a Tip Top K9, and they are a franchise, and they’re a client that I’ve helped to franchise. And I think they have 16 locations open maybe now. I’m probably getting that wrong, maybe it’s 17 now. But they’re all over the country. They’ve got different locations on the tip tops. And one of the things that has to happen is as the company begins to grow, it’s, you know, we have to come up with a system to organize the systems, you know, to organize all the documents so that everybody can find them. And there’s so many core documents they’ve made over the years. And it’s like, we’ve got to be able to find those quickly. If someone’s looking for the system for how to train a German shepherd, or how to write up an employee, or how to find the core values document, or how to find the goal sheets, or how to find the insurance processes, or the intake checklist, or the bootcamp checklist, or the closing progression, or the sales manual. They have all those documents organized in one place, and that really does help. And so we get off, I’d love to book a time. Yeah. So you and I can hop on a call and we’ll talk about kind of phase 2.0 as we take you from time freedom to maybe opening up multiple locations or scaling or whatever it is that you want to do. But thank you for carving out time for us today. And for anybody out there that’s listening, who’s contemplating scheduling a free consultation by going to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EO fire. That’s thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EO fire or thinking about coming to one of our in-person business workshops. What would you say to them? I would encourage you to do so immediately. It would free up your time and give you more freedom. I’d encourage them to contact Clay Clark, Sean Thrive Time Show and come to one of those business meetings. And I will say this too housekeeping note, a final note here. Our consulting is $1,700 a month. So if anybody out there listening is saying, what do you guys charge? It’s 1,700 a month, one seven zero zero per month. It’s all month to month. And we have business conferences and we have VIP tickets and general admission tickets and we make it affordable for everybody. And we have scholarship tickets so everybody can afford to go. Thank you so much for carving out time here. I really do appreciate you. Thank you. And we’ll talk to you soon. Take care, brother. Yes, sir, thanks. Great job. You have questions? America’s number one business coach has answers. It’s your Broda from Minnesota. Here’s another edition of Ask Clay Anything on the Thrive Time Business Coach Radio Show. Yes, yes, yes, and yes, Dr. Z, we have a hot question. It’s hot. Andrew, you know how hot this question is? Pretty darn hot. Oh yeah, there we go. Step in into the business coach’s saunas. That’s right. Okay, now here’s the question. I knew I was hot in here. The question from the Thriver was, how do you deal with a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? And how often do you guys have these? So we’re going to go around the horn. We have Paul Hood, a CPA with thousands of clients on the show. We’ve got Dr. Z here on the show. We’ve got myself. So let’s go around the horn and let’s talk about it. So, Z, how often do you have the things, the variables, the bad things happen to you that some would consider to be… You’re a positive guy, so you don’t let it get you down. But how often do things happen to you where it would be easy to say, wow, that was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Short of resetting my watermark, as I call it, there was a period of my life that I had a series of very unfortunate things happen to me and my family and my business, and that was pretty much my high watermark of stress and bad day. So once you kind of reset that watermark pretty high, it was a pretty high one for me that time. Everything else you kind of go, you put it in perspective and go, well, you know, compared to that day, it’s not so bad. It could be worse. It could be worse. Oh, it could be worse. Don’t you know? It could be worse. In Minnesota, by the way, if you ask anyone how they’re doing, you have about a 40% chance that they will respond with, oh, it could be worse. It could be worse. No matter what’s going on. That’s about the peak of the optimism. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it could be worse. But what I do is this, a lot of times, depending upon what category it’s in and how to process it, it can be pretty daunting. It can be pretty debilitating, and if you don’t get on top of it with your brain pretty quickly, it can kind of really shut you down for a little while. But when you have a really, really bad day, one thing that I like to do is I like to think about all the positives in my life. I like to pray also and be thankful for all the positive things in my life. I’ll just go through a checklist of all the home runs, all the games won, you know, all those positive memories in your life. You go back home and you look at that big fat head of you, the full-size photo of you, and go, well done. That’s the only head I know that’s bigger than yours, by the way. It’s a big head. I don’t think it’s that big. My head, I was, do I wear a size 14 hat size? So it’s 14 and 3 quarters? I was 18 and a half. 18 and a half. Okay, nice. Well, you were like, your hat’s loose. You’re right. But I think the key is that you have to understand that if you’re in control of your joy, and this is a word for everybody listening out there, if you’re in control of your joy, then nothing can take it away from you. Nothing can take away your happiness. If you’re waiting for something to make you happy, you’re doing the wrong thing. And if you let something make you unhappy, you’re doing the wrong thing. So you need to be in control of your joy. You need to be in control. If it’s a bad day, how are you going to fix it? Is there a problem that needs to be fixed or is it just a bad day? But if there’s a problem that needs to be fixed, I go into problem solving mode. Step one, what do I need to do? Step two, what do I need to do? Step three, what do I need to do? Oh, and by the way, I’m really thankful because I’ve got three healthy children. I’m really thankful that I’ve got all these things I’m thankful for. I’d like to get Paul’s take on this, because Paul, you manage a team of employees. Yes, sir. And your core team at your three offices, how many people approximately are we talking about? Between the three offices, because you have other offices and locations, you’re always expanding, but maybe between Bartlesville, Tulsa, Claremont, how many people are we talking about? Well, we have a total of probably about 40 employees, but my key group is probably 12 or so. So let’s think about our 12s. Let’s think about your 12s. You think about your core 12. I’ll think about my core 12 for a second. It seems as though there’s always something going on in the lives of one of those 12 people because there’s 12 people. There’s so many people, there’s always something. Now, Z, with a team of like 50, there’s usually two or three bad things happening every day between those 50. Unfortunately, yes. And with thousands of customers, there seems to be usually, if you have a thousand customers that you provide service for a month, if you’re awesome, you have like a 1 or 3 percent complaint rate. So think about that. Elephant in the room, Paul, we have 4,000 members, and see if we make a mistake with somebody’s hair, even only 2 percent of the time, that’s 80 bona fide complaints a month. So we had a guy, Shabamie, from Minnesota, and I remember him saying this, he goes, how many complaints do you get a day? Did he say it could have been worse? Well, this is really funny. He goes, how many do you get a day? And I said, like three. He goes, three? I said, yeah, I mean, they only get to me if they’re like next level. But he goes, just for that business? And I said, yeah. So you get like, how many complaints a month? Do the math. Dozens, I mean, you know what I mean? And you start, but he goes, I don’t think I can handle that. And it was very good for him to know that he emotionally could. I said, why not? He goes, I just, it bothers me. If I get a bad review, it’ll bother me for like a month. Which is unfortunate. So I want to ask you this, Paul. With your clients, you do your best to serve your clients. I know you want to do your best. But if, for whatever reason, like our haircut business, we make a mistake 2% of the time, or if there’s a misunderstanding or whatever, how do you process that when a customer is frustrated? How do you emotionally and mentally process it when your business occasionally misses the mark like my business does and I think any business does? Well Clay, just like anything, you have to separate real issues with fake issues. You have a family member die. That’s something that there’s not a lot of positive that comes out of that. down issues or complaints or bad things. Really what I try to do is embrace that and accept that and appreciate that as a learning experience because if you’ve got an issue, it’s kind of like let’s say you’re driving down the road and you have your family in the car and the car starts sputtering and everything and you can get really upset but the reality is maybe that sputtering helps save you from having a wreck. And so the way I look at things is I try to find the positive in it. And I try not to get real upset and just try to say, well, this is something that’s strengthening my team. It’s a learning opportunity. It’s an opportunity to fix something. You know, I’m a registered investment advisor and a personal financial specialist, and I get audited every year by a government entity or whatever. I embrace that because if I’m not doing something to the best of our abilities or missing something, I want to know. I don’t think it’s… And so, if I’ve got a client that complains, and honestly, and I don’t say this to be mean, two-thirds of the complaints are really not valid, but it doesn’t really matter because marketing to me is top of mind. It’s how that person feels when they walk out of my office and what they’re going to say to other people. And so the old adage, the customer is always right is kind of right. But I embrace it. I approach it head on. I personally make the phone call. And what can I do to solve this to make you feel better, to make you happy? And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a valid complaint or not. It’s a complaint. And so, I was taught a long time ago, do I want to be right or do I want to be rich? So I’d rather be rich than argue with a client all the time. I just want to make them happy. I have found for me, and Zee, I want to get your take on this. I’ve got a few notable quotables I want to read to you. From the first one will be from that controversial book known as the Bible, Matthew 5.10, I love that verse, Matthew 5.10 says, Blessed are those who are persecuted because of their righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So blessed are those who are persecuted for being right. So here’s an example. You have an employee that works for you, Z, and they’re supposed to be on time, and they’re not. So your job as the owner, manager, whatever, is to bring it up. You say, hey, Doug, I need you to be on time. And Doug goes, oh, come on. Come on, man. What? And there’s this blow up. And some people attack you when you call them out for being wrong. You hold them accountable. Oh, I know. I know. So I think part of it is just embracing that if you’re going to hold people accountable, aka run a business, you just have to get really good with knowing that a lot of people won’t be happy with you all the time, right? Don’t you have to get to a place where you just say? Hopefully there’s a reward in heaven because I’m certainly you know I mean blessed are those who are persecuted because of their righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven I mean you have to just go well Hopefully there’s a reward up there because whoa Well, I like the reward could be in the bank statement because all of a sudden you’re cracking the whip and you make your business Run better, right? But I’m for everybody listening out there if you’re thinking about we know 67% of you are, according to Forbes. That is our business Bible, by the way. Not taking anything away from the actual Bible, but that’s the business Bible. What happens is that if you go into this owning a business with the idea that you only get to wear the white hat, and you only get to be the good cop… You’re going to lose. At times you’ve got to put them on the black hat. At times you’ve got to be the bad cop. At times you’ve got to call people out and you’ve got to correct them. And you know, pruning and correction is good. Don’t you agree though that it’s kind of like raising kids. You can be a lazy parent and let them play in the street because you don’t want to upset them and correct them. The same thing applies with employees. If you hold them accountable, that’s actually good for them. It’s good for your business. It’s good for your other employees, but it’s good for them. When you’re not holding them accountable, you’re accepting their slackery, and therefore it’s bad for them, and they’re never going to achieve and reach their potential. I think about our office and just people on my team. There’s a guy on our team named Matt, and Matt always says, how can I get better? So I give him the same information as I might give somebody else, the same coaching, and he says, thank you. Thank you. How can I get better? But I think a lot of bosses feel like they’re being a bad guy, quote unquote. I hate to be the bad guy, but just by telling somebody, hey, you need to follow the script, hey, you need to show up on time. This is what I’m paying you to do. And they feel bad about holding someone accountable because they’re the bad guy. You’re not the bad guy. You’re the right guy. You’re the righteous guy. Here’s another thought. Robert Green, the best-selling author of the book called Mastery. He writes, the most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. Some people have really dark qualities that are especially pronounced. You cannot change such people at their core, but you must merely avoid becoming their victim. Do you agree with that, Z? Absolutely. People change seldom. It’s one of my core things. If they’re a bad apple, they’re typically going to be a bad apple. Instead of sitting there worrying about trying to life coach them into being a good apple, just get them out of your space. The quote that Z gave me years ago was so good. I love this quote. I’m going to high five. This will set me free. High five. This is a good quote. You said to me, you said, Clay, unless you’re a life coach, don’t life coach him. I was going, whoa, whoa, because that’s where I was at for a long time as a young man. I kept trying to fix everybody. How many businesses have you coached over the years where the owner comes up to you and they’ve got a bad apple working for them, and they refuse to fire them because they just know it’s maybe poor management, it’s poor people skills on their part, and they put reflective fault back on the den. I would say it’s two-thirds of what prevents businesses from growing. Yeah. It’s crazy. It’s the inability of the owner to hold people accountable, the complete refusal to hold people accountable. As we get back into this root topic of how to deal with the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, I’ve got a couple quick tips here for you, and I’m going to give them to you. One is there’s a Joel Osteen quote from the book called The Best Life Now that set me free here. It says, live your best life now. He says, do your best and forget the rest, and just give God the stress. So for me as a Christian, I go, I did my best. Okay, God, if you want me to be going through this whole Job phase of my life right now, if this is like some teaching part of the Bible where I’m getting punished or something, let that happen. If not, whatever. But I used to, once I just realized, you do your best and forget the rest, that helped me a lot. Probably because it rhymed. That’s a rapper coming out of you right there. But seriously, it helped me just to know you do your best and forget the rest. And now, I don’t care at all. I don’t care if somebody’s not happy and I did my best. I just don’t care. I don’t care. But I used to care a lot. Don’t you think a lot of that though comes from your core values of what’s important in life. You know, we make good money. But it’s not about the money. You know, I grew up, I’ve lived in trailer parks. I have both, nobody in either side of my family graduated high school besides my mom and I. I can be happy living in a trailer park. Not that there’s anything wrong with a trailer park. The point is, it’s not the money and I have confidence in myself to rebuild. If something falls apart, I’m going to do my best and if other people can run along with me, great. But you know the reality is I’m going to be happy regardless. So this is what I want you to do right now. This is what I want you to do. This is the action item for all the listeners out there. See, here we go. If somebody out there, if you’re having something bad happen to you today, tomorrow, the next 10 minutes, whatever, something bad happens, I want you to do this thing called the five minute rule. This is the rule I live by. All right. I try to do it. I’d say by 99% of the time I do it. Don’t make any decisions ever when mad. Okay, that’s good. Don’t make a decision. Just do not make a decision when mad. Then during those five minutes, think about the decision you’re going to make. How will it affect you a year from now? Will it affect you? Okay. So, as an example, when I went in the other day to a local fast food restaurant and they totally jacked up my order, you know why I didn’t freak out, Z? Uh, because you did the five minute rule. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Five years from now, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. The other day I was in a parking lot at Atwood’s and a guy cut me off. You spend a lot of time at Atwood’s. Well, a guy cut me off with a big monster truck wheel thing. Oh, yeah. He gives me the stink eye. I get out of my car and he’s like following me out, following me into the store with the stink eye, you know why I didn’t say anything to him? Because it doesn’t matter. It’s a five minute rule. I can make a decision while I’m mad. I don’t want to get beat up in the parking lot of Atwood’s so I can write the wrongs. Don’t give me that shovel I was telling you about. So the next time you get upset, take five minutes, think about that. If it’s a bigger decision, if it’s a big purchase, if it’s a big… Don’t go buy things when you’re angry. Just don’t take big action when you’re angry. I promise your life will be better if you have more of a long-term perspective to everything. And that is how you deal with a no-good, terrible day. If you’re out there today and you’re having something bad in your life, don’t make it worse by making immediate action while angry. Don’t make it worse. Yeah, when you fight yourself in a hole. You know what they say, see a broad to get that booty, yak him. Lay her down or smack him, yak him. Stop the digging. And now, without any further ado, we’d like to end each and every show with a boom. So here we go. Three, two, one, boom! JT, do you know what time it is? Um, 410. It’s 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 in the 2-Day Interactive Thrive Time Show Business Growth Workshop. Yes, folks, put it in your calendar this December, the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the Thrive Time Show 2-Day Interactive Business Growth Workshop. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old and a lot of people, you know, have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field. And off the field the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Hmm, well, they’re gonna have to come and find out, because I don’t know. I’m just saying, Tim Tebow is going to teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Folks, I’m telling you, if you want to learn branding, you want to learn marketing, you want to learn search engine optimization, you want to learn social media marketing, that’s what we teach at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive workshop. If you want to learn accounting, you want to learn sales systems, you want to learn how to build a linear workflow, you want to learn how to franchise your business, that is what we teach at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. You know, over the years we’ve had the opportunity to feature Michael Levine, the PR consultant of choice for Nike, for Prince, for Michael Jackson. The top PR consultant in the history of the planet has spoken at the Thrive Time Show workshops. We’ve had Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, a company that creates apparel worn by celebrities all throughout the world. Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, has spoken at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshops. We have the guy, we’ve had the man who’s responsible for turning around Harley Davidson, a man by the name of Ken Schmidt He has spoken at the thrive time show two-day interactive business workshops folks I’m telling you these events are gonna 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 as 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’ve been able to build multi-million dollar companies. Watch those testimonials today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Simply by clicking on the testimonials button right there at Thrivetimeshow.com, you’re gonna see thousands of people just like you who’ve been able to go from just surviving to thriving. Each and every day we’re gonna add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? What do I do? How does it work? You just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to Thrivetimeshow.com. 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. It says it’s 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 and Jinx you can get a sneak peek or a look at Our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast You can look inside see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here It is going to be packed now for this particular event folks. The seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless Convention center you’re coming to my actual home office and so it’s going to be packed. Who? You! You’re going to come! I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at ThriveTimeShow.com and again you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford and we do have some select VIP tickets which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things and those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical. It’s actionable. And it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine, and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years, 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars, and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies. 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 scape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system. When you do that research you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see you. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you got to do is go to thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250 we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy in Kings Point in New York, octa non verba. Watch what a person does not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Kiyosaki, the Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re closed, but they’re completely different worlds 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 this show before also But very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts as a mr. And so Mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend, Eric Trump. But we’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man, and there’s so many ways we could take this thing. But I thought, since you and Eric are close, Trump, what were you saying about what Trump can’t, what Donald, who’s my age, and I can say or cannot say? Well, I have to, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorn, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV, and he said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? And I said, no. And my father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books and I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner to the investor and I owe a lot of that to you and I just 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. Well, not only that Clay, thank you but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, King’s Point in New York, I learned at the Academy, King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say.