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What if you could decide today to become an automatic millionaire simply by changing just a few daily habits? And the good news is you only have to make the decision one time and then you can be 100% certain for sure that you would in fact retire as an automatic millionaire. Well on today’s show the 9 time New York Times bestselling author Mr. David Bach joins us to teach you his secrets for becoming an automatic millionaire. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men, eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Timeshow. Thrive Time Show. Now, 3, 2, 1, here we go! Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, ladies and gentlemen, on today’s show we are interviewing a nine-time New York Times best-selling author who is best known for his Finish Rich book and the Automatic Millionaire series of financial books. He’s just recently released his 20th anniversary edition of his mega-seller, Smart Women Finish Rich. David holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California, and throughout his career, he has appeared on the Today Show, CNBC, Fox Business, Live with Regis and Kelly, The View, Larry King, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and anywhere on the planet that TVs are sold. Ladies and gentlemen, David has impacted my life in a profound way with this thing he calls the latte effect. Let’s welcome on, without any further ado, Mr. David Bach. Welcome on, sir. Wow, I love it. Well, it’s great to be on the show with you. Thank you for, I don’t know, just a totally awesome introduction. I love your energy. David, years ago, my wife and I, we were getting this book called The Automatic Millionaire because I don’t do road trips unless I have an audio book. And then if I listen to the audio book and I like it, I buy the physical book. So I picked up the book called The Automatic Millionaire. And at the time, I had a company called DJ Connection, which I later sold, but before I sold it we were doing 4,000 weddings or corporate events a year. And it still exists today. Wow. DJConnection.com. And you said, you challenged me. You said, you Mr. Clay Clark, you Mr. Listener, you Mr. Whoever You Are, you have to save at least one hour per day of income regardless of how much money you’re making. And at the time I was making a copious amount of money. Can you talk to us about the importance of beginning to save one hour per day of income regardless of how much money we’re making? Yeah I mean I would love you because honestly this is what should be taught to you before you get out of like the eighth grade. So let me start by saying this the average person in America is gonna work 90,000 hours. That’s a lot of hours, right? So, and if you’re both working, which today many families both work, right? You could have a family that the two of you combined will work over 200,000 hours during your lifetime. So, if you just take that math and you go, well, geez, well, so I guess if people are working so hard then they must all end up with a lot of money, right? Because you trade your time for money when you go to work. So, are they? And that’s really the core issue. They’re not, right? So one out of two Americans right now, according to the Federal Reserve, can’t get their hands on $400 in case of emergency purposes. True. $400, right? $400, yeah. So the follow-up book to The Automatic Millionaire was actually a book called Start Late, Finish Rich. And when I wrote Start Late, Finish Rich, the thing that blew my mind away was that the statistics said that 60% to 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So what I started saying to people was, ìLook, hereís the deal. The entire secret to building wealth is that you have to fight for your paycheck and you have to keep the first hour of the day of your income.î And what that means is super simple. You go to work at 9 oíclock and you work until 5. On a typical day, you need to keep whatever you earn the first hour. So from 9 to 10, let’s say you make $20 an hour, or $50 an hour, or $100 an hour. Whatever that first hour of income is, it’s got to go straight to you. And the only legal way to have it go straight to you where it doesn’t go to taxes, or Social Security, or state tax. Like I live in New York City, right? I’ve got federal tax, I’ve got state tax, I’ve got city tax, I’ve got social security tax. When I earn a dollar, over 40 cents on the dollar is gone before I can ever see it, right? The only way I can not pay those taxes, and the key word here is legally, is if I take money that first hour day of my income and I put it in a deductible retirement account. So for someone who’s listening that’s got a job, it’s going to be like a 401k plan. Or if you’re a teacher, it’s going to be a 403b plan. Or if you’re a government worker, it might be a TSA plan. Or if you’re self-employed, like you probably, you know, you were self-employed, right, when you had this DJ Connections. It’s a self-employed retirement account. It’s like a SEP IRA account. And many entrepreneurs don’t even fund these accounts because they don’t even know about them. So the whole concept of pay yourself first, one hour a day of your income, is that if you do that, you’re saving 12.5% of your gross income. And that’s a really good starting number. Now I’ve got to be honest, I’m starting to try to get Americans to save more than that. You know, 15-20% of your gross income is even better and I taught that in the Automatic Millionaire. Like if you want to get rich faster, it’s 15% to 20%. But getting people to focus on one hour a day of your income, I really do think it’s been a game changer. When I put out The Automatic Millionaire, we launched the book on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and this is back in 2004. And this idea of getting people to think about it in terms of why would you go to work and not keep the first hour day of your income, I think it was a light bulb moment for people, like obviously it reached you, right? Like you remembered it and it got other people to kind of go home and think about that and talk about it with their wife and talk about it with their family and make that a goal. You know what? And it’s a great goal. One thing that, and I mean this in a positive way, so if you don’t like this compliment, if you feel like this is a backhanded compliment, you can feel free to hang up and I’ll know. Click. I’ll pick up on that subtle cue. But you are not Yoda, you know, you’re more of a Broda. I mean you are like, the way you write, the way you write is like, I feel like it’s my brother from another mother writing on a third grade level that I can understand. You don’t talk in financial jargon, your books are very easy to read, easy to understand, they’re real page turners. I mean they’re very easy to read. And one of your books you wrote, you said, the number one financial mistake is not to have your finances on automatic. And I wrote that down in my man journal, man journal, wrote it down. And I wrote it down, I go, automatic. I mean, everything about my company, DJ Connection, was automatic. Every DJ had a checklist for their shows. After the wedding, we sent the bride a survey. Based on their survey, we determined how much the DJ got paid. And so if a DJ got a bad review, he made very little money. If he got a great review, he made a lot of money. And everything in my life is automatic. Checklist, systems, processes. Why aren’t my finances automatic? Can you explain to our listeners what it means to have… Help us. Help us get our finances on automatic. Yeah, well, I mean, here’s why it needs to be automatic. I mean, I learned this by being a financial advisor, working with people in the real world. What I saw is that when someone says, you know, I’m disciplined, David, I’m gonna write a check, I’ll bring you the money every month to save. Nobody did it, right? They might do it for two months, the record was six. So what I saw firsthand was the only way people will really save money for whatever it is, retirement, buying a home, college savings, wanting to start a new business, the only way people are successful at investing and saving is when they save automatically and when they have the money moved automatically. So the automatic millionaire was really about simple idea and nothing has changed because it’s timeless principles. First of all, don’t try to have a budget because budgets suck. People have been told for decades and generations, you need a budget. If budgets worked, then everybody would be wealthy. But you go on a budget, they’re totally frustrated, a couple fight over their budgets all the time. What works is saving money automatically. So I taught in the automatic mill here, throw the budget out. I learned with my clients, forget the budget, let’s just make sure you’re taking 10% off the top or 20% off the top. Let’s move this money automatically. Every time money comes in, let’s move it automatically into the places it needs to go. And that’s kind of the next part of automation is where does the money need to go? And when you get into real financial planning, if you were to simplify it, which is what I live to do is to make it simple because the problem with money is people make it too complicated. If you were to simplify money, there’s like a handful of things that you need to make automatic. You need your bills made automatic. You need your emergency account made automatic. You need your retirement account made automatic. And then you need a dream account made automatic. Oh yes. David, I want to put this all in the show notes. Will you just, I want to, in my passive aggressive attempt to book you on the show again. I mean, you are so good. You’re preaching this automatic, automatic, automatic. Somebody out there is going, I want to make it automatic. What do I do? What do I do David and here’s the thing that’s incredible is like this used to be so hard this didn’t used to be easy to do right like 20 years ago I got in this business in 1993 I didn’t think about this for a second so you know back in the day if you would come into my office and I was at Morgan Stanley and I wanted to just automate a savings account for you I’d have to have you fill out like six pieces of paperwork it was a huge process right today when somebody wants to do anything automated now with technology you can really open up your iPhone Go click click click most financial service companies today are at a point where you can have funny your financial life in some cases Automated in less than 10 minutes. You can open up a savings account in less than 10 minutes online. You can order you can have an automated Retirement account with a diversified portfolio in less than 10 minutes. Things have been made really simple. By the way, that simplicity is also making it so that now more and more people are saving money automatically. There are now a lot of people who are building real wealth because of automated savings. By the way, back in 1993, a lot of our listeners probably couldn’t focus on their finances because they were listening to Wump, There It Is. Now people have the ability to focus. That song was hot back in 1993. Just a little DJ fun factoid for you. I want to ask you this because I know there’s somebody out there who’s a big fan of Marie Forleo. And I saw you on an interview with her where you were quoted as having written in the past, you wrote, we need to start with our values because your values can determine how hard you are willing to work to achieve your financial goals How much money you currently spend and how much money you will actually need for retirement? Could you talk to us about the importance of knowing our financial values? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love Marie Forleo and I love that you watch that video It’s a great video and they can people can go and find that David Bach Marie Forleo I’ll put a link to it on the show notes. Yeah, because that was a great interview and I love her and she’s here in New York City also and we’ve become good friends. And you know and I’ve known Marie for over 10 years and I think you know what I’ve always talked about since the beginning of my career is that all financial planning is personal but it should be based off your values. If you can look at what’s really most important to you. Why do you want money? Instead of just saying, oh, I want a million dollars. What is it that you want? Why do you want money? Well, I want to be financially free. Well, what does that mean to you? You know, I’d like to go start a new business or I’d like to take my family to Hawaii or I want to make sure that I have security. I want to be able to give back to my community. If you can drill down deeper into what your values are. I teach in some of my first books, like Smart Women Finish Rich, which we just put out as a 20-year anniversary edition. That was my first book. Smart Women Finish Rich starts by having you look at what your values are. Once you’re clear on your values, you make your financial goals based off of those, and then you do all your financial planning around those. I have a quick confession real quick because this might get weird. Shep, this might get weird for the listeners out there. Sometimes it does. I mean, I’m sorry, Dave. I know we’re just meeting each other. I think I’ve known you forever because I’ve listened to every interview you’ve ever done. Here’s the deal. I actually read smart women finish rich in preparation for today’s show. And wow, we had the 20th anniversary and it was like it was it was it wasn’t super. I mean, you didn’t tell me, Clay, make sure you get estrogen injections. I mean, it wasn’t super weird. I mean, but the thing is, there’s so many women in my in my case, in my family, my wife and I, we were we have five kids and we work together on everything. We work together in every business. And I’m offense, my wife’s defense and the service we offer or the product we offer for any company is the special teams. I’m the offense. I do the marketing, the advertising, that kind of the sales. And my wife does the accounting, the financial planning, and when I picked up the book, that’s what my wife does. Vanessa does the financial planning for our family. And I think there’s a lot of women out there who have their head down, and they assume that their husband is doing the financial planning. They assume that they’re doing something. They go through a divorce, they go through a medical issue, their husband passes away, something terrible happens, and then they discover that their husband has not been actually saving money. Can you talk to the ladies out there, all the single ladies, all the married ladies, all the sophisticated mamas out there, who are finding themselves totally unaware of what’s going on financially and why they should pick up Smart Women Finish Rich? Yeah, well, I mean, absolutely. So Smart Women Finish Rich was the first book that I wrote. And I’m glad that you read it because I give that book to a lot of my guy friends back when I wrote it and it’s very helpful. I think the thing for women to know is this, if you’re in a marriage right now and you have a good marriage, that’s great, but what you need to know is you’re gonna outlive your husband. Oh, come on, so negative. So, but I’m gonna like cut to the chase here because there’s really three core issues that women face. In most cases, women outlive their husbands. 80% of women die widowed, and 80% of men die married. So the average age of widowhood, when I wrote the book originally, was 56. Today, it’s gone up, it’s 59. That’s still really young. And for the family, and people go, how is that possible? Because women tend to marry men that are older, men pass away first. So the first thing you need to know is, I always tell ladies, I don’t care if you marry the local bank president, at some point, there’s a very good chance you’ll be the one in charge of the money. The time to be in charge of not just paying the bills, but knowing where all the money is, is today. So knowing where’s the will, where’s the life insurance, do we have life insurance? Where are the retirement accounts? Are we putting enough away in our retirement accounts? Are the beneficiaries up to date? Where’s the college savings plan? All these things, there’s like 17 things that I list in the book. There’s like a little, what I call a finisher’s quiz. And you go through all these questions to take a look at like, what do you know or what don’t you know since you can get on track with it? But the thing women need to know is you’re gonna be in charge of the money at some point so it’s the best time to be in charge of the money now. Second thing to know is you’re gonna live longer in retirement than most men do. Women are often retired five, 10, 15, 20, some cases 30 years longer than their husbands. So you need more money set aside for retirement. And the third thing you need to know is that a lot of women are earning less than men, which women know this, but the reasons why haven’t changed a lot over 20 years. One is, first of all, they’re not paid equally in many cases but then they take time off from work to be full-time moms, which is a full-time job. And on average, women take somewhere between seven to 11 years off from work at prime earning years. So when they have children, and I don’t know, it doesn’t sound like your wife did this, but when a lot of women have children, that becomes their full-time job and therefore they’re walking away from work or they’re having to leave work because of their situation in their prime earning years which impacts their income and impacts how much money they have in savings. It’s not just in savings, it’s in Social Security and it’s in pension plans and women have less money in social security and pension plans. So what Smart Women Finish Rich was all about was empowering women to wake up to what it is you specifically need to do to fix this, what’s called a retirement gap. How do you protect yourself as a woman? And my mission, my mantra for 20 some years has been I don’t care if you’re a woman, I don’t care if you’re married, single, widowed, divorced, you have to be the one in charge of your financial life. I learned about money from my grandmother, Rose Bach. She was a woman who started with nothing, without a college education. She became a self-made millionaire. She was broke at 30. She learned how to do this and she passed the lessons for it. She taught my father how to do it, myself, my sister. And really when I started teaching seminars for women and money back in 1994, it was in an effort to basically pass along these lessons from my grandmother because I had seen so many women hurt through widowhood and divorce financially. I just wanted to do something about it. The crazy thing is here, I’m here 24 years later. Smart Women Finish Rich has sold a million copies. It’s one of the most popular books for women and money that’s ever been out. I’m psyched that you just read it because when I went to go update it, the message was timeless. I just had to update things like the tax rules and the different retirement accounts that are available and the different financial service companies, but the message is timeless and it’s timely. I think more women today are waking up to the fact that if you want to be in charge of your life, be in charge of your money. David, just for the listeners out there who listen to our show regularly, I want to share this with you. When I was building DJ Connection, my wife and I, we got married when we were 20 years old. We’re 20 years old. We started our company. Everyone kept saying, when’s the baby due? We weren’t pregnant. We just got married early. We went to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We started DJ Connection. We decided we want to have five kids. We want to be married for a few years. And so we ended up having, we were married about four years, and then we had five kids under the age of seven. Boom, boom, boom, and then twins at one time. Boom, boom. And so my wife did peace out. She did leave. She did exit the daily operations of the company. But every week she would look at our finances, and she would say, baby, are you saving some money? And I would say, because I’m the spender in the family, David. Yeah, I go, baby, I just want to buy a little bit of pinion wood, just a little bit of nice limestone rocks for my backyard. I just want to. And I’m the guy who always wants to buy one more accoutrement, one more piece of decor. You know what I mean? I’m the guy who likes to buy speakers, new microphones. I’m kind of an audiophile. But my wife would always rein it in and say, this is how much you can spend this week. And when she first started presenting this to me about year two of our marriage, I thought, she hates me. She hates me. She hates me. I thought that because my wife would tell me, you have definitely exceeded your $1,000 per week discretionary spending budget or whatever. And so next week you can spend 200. I’m like, oh, you’re unbelievable. Why do you hate my dreams? But I think there’s somebody out there in the family. Talk to the couples out there. Maybe the husband’s the one who’s locking down the automatic savings. Maybe it’s the wife who’s doing it. Can you talk about why the person who’s being financially prudent and who sets up the automatic millionaire process is not actually the enemy, but they’re actually the hero? Well, OK, so let me ask you, because this happened to you, are you glad that she did this to you? Yes, yes, but I was so pissed consistently. I thought she hated me every week, but then I was happy the next week. So let’s talk about you, because you’re a living, breathing example of this. When did you turn the corner and realize, you know what, actually this is a pretty good idea and I’m glad we did this? A little confession, I know you’re not a priest, but you could be the financial coaching priest for people out there. I’ve been married 17 years, I’m 37, and I think when I turned 27, I finally said thank you, because I’m a horrible person. Well, you know, it’s interesting, right, because it’s seven years, so I don’t, I think what it is is that here’s the truth about saving and investing and doing these things really right, you don’t notice the impact, the positive impact always right away. You might notice the pain at first, right? Like, oh, I don’t have the money. I’m not being allowed to go out. Like my grandmother, I’ll use my grandmother box. She realized at 30 she was broke, living paycheck to paycheck and was never going to be able to get ahead unless she changed things in her life. And so she started saving 50 cents a week, 50 cents out of her paycheck, 50 cents out of my grandfather’s paycheck. In order to do that she had to go she worked at Gimbel’s department store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and she had to brown bag her lunch and when she went to Gimbel’s with her brown bag of lunch and her girlfriends would go out to lunch they would tease her and be like oh Rose you’re so cheap and she’d say you know what I’ve made a decision I’m gonna start saving money because I want to have I want to retire down to the beach at some point and they laughed at her. Well you know later on in life she wasn’t spending the winters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where it’s freezing. She was at the beach in Laguna Beach, California. And you know, but that took four, that took like four decades, right? So where I go back to for you is like, seven years, right? Like it makes sense to me that you say, well, in seven years, I started going, wow, you know, this is pretty good. Because what happens is over time, that you know, you, for some people, they’re in debt, but they’ve got two, three years later, all of a sudden, they’re out of debt if you’re automatically paying your debt down early. I teach you in the Automatic Millionaire book how to do that. All of a sudden, your debt is gone. All of a sudden, you’re like, �Wow, I never had any emergency money set aside and now I do.� Or you turn around seven years later, and this is what happens. I get people stopping me on the street and in the airports and sending me emails. Seven years later, you turn around and people come up to me and they’re like, David, I have $100,000 in savings now, or I have a quarter of a million dollars now, or I’ve got… Somebody just put on Amazon the other day that the latte factory, they now own three homes, and they were a renter. Well, they didn’t go from stopping drinking coffee to owning three homes in 30 days. What happened was they read The Automatic Millionaire in 2004, and we’re sitting here in 2018. And so over 14 years of doing all this, their whole life is completely different. So what I would say to somebody, you know, back to your question is that someone’s like really trying to get your financial act together, right? Instead of fighting it, go with it. Go with it. Because here’s the thing, you’re going to get, you’re going to be older, right? You’re going to blink your eyes and 10 years are going to go by, and you’re either going to be 10 years older and still broke, or you could be 10 years older and in much better financial shape. One of my things in the book I say is that wealth isn’t built in days, it’s built in decades. A lot of times, you’re in the podcast world, right? So often it’s all about this whole get rich quick scheme, like I got this thing for you and this is an opportunity. I don’t know anybody who’s gotten rich quick. I know a whole lot of people who have spent their whole life trying to get rich quick and they just stay broke fast. It takes longer to get rich quick, actually, if you look at the math there. It takes so much longer. The weird thing is the compound interest charts that you see in these books where they show you, like, hey, if you saved $5 a day or $10 a day and you invested it, it could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or it could be worth millions. It all comes true. It all works. I knew this would happen because I have like 31 questions prepared for you. I’ve probably gone through seven of them so far. And you’re like the world’s number one financial coach. If I had to give an elevator pitch, David Bach, world’s number one financial coach. And people listen to the show, they go, Clay’s not that smart, he took algebra three times and his ACT three times, but he’s kind of funny. So we listen. So I want to break down three notable quotables and then I want to tell people about the most current project you’re working on. And I want to allow time for you to share with the listeners your most recent project and why they should check it out here. You have said in the past that people basically inflate in their mind how much money they actually make and they almost universally underestimate what they actually spend. What do you mean by this? All the time. If you’re with a buddy and your buddy is like, yeah I make a hundred grand a year. And then you open up the tax returns, because this is the thing about being a financial boss, you actually get to see the truth, right? So if someone says to you I make a hundred grand a year, and then you open it up and you really look at the tax returns, no they don’t, they make 85,000 a year. Okay. They rounded it up, right? Nobody says, oh, I make $83,000 a year. They go, I make 85, or I make 90. People round up what they make. They tell other people, and they tell themselves, I’m actually making more. So if someone’s making 85, they’ll say to people they’re making 100. Okay, that’s number one. Number two is that, then people, when you ask people, how much do you spend? Because I always would do this with them. How much do you think you spend a month? Very little at all. I absolutely always am very conservative. I never overspend. I’m huge. They give you their number, right? No, I’m spending, I think, you know, we probably, and people sort of know, right? They go, I think we’re spending, let’s say, 7,000 a month. I’m just giving you a random number, okay? And then again, I’ll go into the math and if they said they’re spending $7,000 a month, once I go into the real numbers, they’re not. They’re usually spending $8,000 or $9,000 a month. It’s always more. So what happens is if it’s just off by 10% of a person inflates in their mind what they’re making by 10% and then they spend 10% more than they think they are, there’s a 20% difference there, right? But this is why people go, I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. I’m working so hard and I’m making good money and I’m still broke. One of the things that’s often wrong for people is that they’re not telling the truth to themselves about what they really make. And here’s the other thing I’ll say there. People take their gross number, right? So I make $100,000 a year. Well, no you don’t after taxes you make 55,000 I move to I move to Latvia. I have expatriated my money. I don’t want to pay taxes I am in some trouble with the I asked right now, but okay, you’re right So, I mean that’s a that’s that’s one right there and I think You know money’s funny because you made the point about algebra and geometry by the way, I hated those classes I always tell people you know, the good thing about money is it’s super basic math, man. Like if you can take a number 10 and subtract 1 and realize it’s 9, you know all you need to know about money. That’s it. Like, you make $10 and you save a buck, you’re in pretty decent shape, much better than most people. And they go, what? Like, yeah, that’s a good place to start. You make $100, you save $10. Can you figure that out? Yeah? Okay, then good. Start there. You know, I want to respect your time, and I want to ask you two more questions here. The American way, the more we make, the more we spend. And if we’re not careful, the more we owe. Who said that? David Bach, you said the American way, the more we make, the more we spend. And if we’re not careful, the more we owe. I circled that. I highlighted that. I wrote that down. I thought about embroidering it on my face. That might be kind of intense, but I decided not to. But I mean, talk to me about that. The American way. Why is it so screwed up by default? Well, I mean we created the concept of a consumer society, right? So the American dream is to have a lot of stuff And it’s never been easier to market to us to have more stuff, right? So you’re on your phone and now it’s an instagram ad click click click buy something boom It’s never been easier to spend money than it is today. Literally. It’s never been easier. You can just click and buy. Everything around us used to be we were bombarded by tens of thousands of messages a year and now we’re bombarded by hundreds of thousands if not millions of messages a year to spend more money. I went on this tirade the other day on CMBC, it might have been Yahoo, I can’t even track, I’ve been doing so many interviews lately, but it was a tirade about the insanity of buying new cars every three years. And the American way, the American system, the American marketing machine has us programmed to buy new cars every three years. It has us programmed that if we come in any money, we should buy a new car. It has us programmed that if we get a tax refund, it’s time for a new car. And so Americans go out and they buy new cars and they borrow the money and there’s no worse place to put your money than into a brand new car. And yet there’s like $1.5 trillion now in car loans. We have more money in car loans than credit card loans and student loans. And a lot of those loans, people just keep going out and you buy a new car, you buy a $50,000 new car and you’ve been focused on the monthly payment because that’s how they marketed it to you. You drive that car off a lot and that car has gone down in value by $10,000, $15,000 the moment you drive it off a lot. You borrowed money to buy an asset that immediately goes down in value. It’s not an asset, it’s a liability. The whole key to really building wealth in America is this. You can either be somebody who spends money and you can be the consumer, or you can be somebody who owns things. Owners get rich, right? So you can go to Starbucks and have a coffee and spend five bucks, or if you’re gonna not give that up, then at least own Starbucks stock, right? Because if you did, you could have made a fortune. To quote Kanye West, he had a meeting here with Mr. Donald Trump, and they shared their dragon energy together. And Mr. Kanye West, he said, it’s important for us to own lands and not brands. Thank you. Really? I missed that part of the interview. Yeah, you’ve got to watch it. You got to watch it. I just heard about the Superman hat. I was like, I didn’t know when you watched it the fifth time. If you stare at the picture long enough, you will find the notable quotable. I want to ask you this here. You said one of your and one of your books. And again, I’ve got highlights everywhere. And I add it into a big doc that I look at. It says, the truth about business is that it’s normally very tough. It’s very rare that you will start something and succeed right away. And if you do succeed, you might not make a lot of money. Most businesses take at least two or three years to show profits. In my mind, you’re America’s number one financial coach. Why did you say that? Well, I mean, it’s the truth, right? You know a lot of entrepreneurs that make money their first couple years in business. I mean, I know entrepreneurs who have been in business, unfortunately, five, six, seven, eight years, and they still haven’t made any money. What they’re hoping is that as their top line grows, they’re going to turn around and sell the business, and that’s where their money is going to come from. In fact, the entrepreneur fantasy is, I’m going to build a business, and I’m going to sell it, and then that’s how I’ll have money to retire. Today with all these billion dollar unicorn businesses, it seems like it’s easy but that’s a small, small percentage. In fact, most businesses don’t do a million dollars a year in revenue. I think it’s less than 5% of businesses do more than a million. I might have that wrong. I don’t tell Chuck but it looks like less than 5% of businesses do over a million dollars a year in revenue. I was in a group called Entrepreneur’s Organization for like 16, 17 years. It’s one of the leading entrepreneur organizations and you had to do a million dollars in revenue to be in the organization. You had to be the founder of the company. That was like that line in the sand that you had to do a million dollars or more weeds out most entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs don’t have big businesses and many entrepreneurs, they’re constantly putting their money back in the business to grow and they’re not taking money out for themselves. Or what they’ve been trained to do by their accountants is run all their expenses through their business. When they do that, they get to the end of the year and then they have no profit. If they have no profit, what it really means is they actually don’t have any money. You like that sound you just made. I’ll do that from stage in front of entrepreneurs where I’ll diagram what that looks like. I’ll literally do the math. And they told you to run all these expenses through and now you got to the end of the year and you’re at zero and they go, this is great, you paid no taxes. And then I go, so where’s your money? The thing is, you know, there’s a sound effect that really typifies, explains what you just said. That’s how we feel. That’s how we feel. A lot of accountants are coaching us to be poor, but you’re coaching your clients, your listeners, your nation to be successful. And I would like for you to share with the listeners, what is the most recent project you’re working on right now? Because I’m an absolute homer for you. And not because I’m delusional, not because I’m delirious, but because I’m serious about success and you have blessed me profoundly and I have only paid you in my lifetime $80 that I know of. I purchased four of your books because I’m a bad person. I need to pay you more. Really, if you bought eight out of the books, it means that I made about probably $250 in royalties, right? Look at Amelius. I’m going to set up a PayPal GoFundMe account for you. We’ll see if we can support David Bach, America’s number one financial coach. Seriously, you’ve helped me so much, brother. I just want the listeners to know what you’re working on right now because they need to go check it out. Hey, I’m super grateful to you. This has been really fun and I would love to do a show with you again. This was a blast. I enjoyed it. First of all, come visit me over at my website. Go to DavidBach.com and you can join our newsletter, which is free. Every two weeks I send out ideas and tidbits that can help you live and finish rich for the rest of your life. So that’s davidbach.com. The new book is Smart Women Finish Rich, just came out about two weeks ago. It’s in stores now. It’s updated 20 year anniversary edition. We also brought an updated edition of Smart Couples Finish Rich. That’s a brand new updated book and it’s in stores now. It’s all on my website. Automatic Millionaire has been updated. So three of my books we’ve updated in the last 18 months, all brand new, available for you. Also from an entrepreneur standpoint, I’m a co-founder of a financial service company. The name of it is AE Wealth Management and we have financial advisors all over the country. So that’s been my entrepreneur passion project the last three years. We’re the second fastest growing RIA in America according to Investment News and we’re really growing fast and having a ton of fun doing that, helping retirees all across America. And then the last thing is I am working on finishing my next book, which I’ll come back and talk to you about, which is coming out May 7th, 2019. It is called The Latte Factor. And it is a parable. It’s like a who moved my cheese for personal finance that’s written for people who probably normally would never read a financial book. I put my best wisdom, simple nuggets into a little story that you can read in like less than an hour and hopefully that’s a book that my dream is it will translate all over the world and will spread the message of these simple ideas that pay yourself first, find your latte factor, save money automatically but will spread it in a way that especially young people will begin to realize that you don’t need to be rich to live rich. That’s really my next big question. I want to sneak in a bonus question you can hang up here. Yeah. Why? Because you are so successful. You’ve been a nine times New York Times best-selling author. You’ve been on Oprah. You’ve been on The View. And by the way, you’ve been on the Today Show, CNBC, Fox Business. You are the who’s who. You are the financial coach for America. Why are you so passionate about helping the listener listening right now? Not the listeners, but the specific person listening right now. Why do you care so much about their financial future? You know, it’s such a good question. I’ll just be like totally open-hearted and honest with you at this very moment because I’m at a raw point. It’s been a long day. I’ve had a computer crash and I’ve had like four interviews and then I’ve rewritten the copy, the actual copy that’s going to go on Amazon for this new book, The Latte Factor. We’ve been rewriting the copy for three weeks. Hopefully this is not your worst interview of the day. And the funny thing, as I basically looked at this document 45 minutes ago before I got on this interview with you and I thought to myself, why am I still torturing myself with this work? And the answer is, well, I don’t know what the, it’s like a disease, right? I just deeply still care about what I teach. I love talking to people like you before we did the interview and finding out I wrote a little book and that message somehow reached you Yep, and it helped change your life and I still absolutely positively Love that that feeling that I get from knowing that I’m making an impact with my life and for whatever reason I think God put me here with this gift truth She and this is like my gift and I keep saying to God like am I supposed to keep doing this? And here’s the funny thing, like the latte. I just watched his interview with Tim Ferriss. And I remember when Tim Ferriss reached out to me before he put out his first book. And I was watching this interview with Tim Ferriss and he was talking about, you know, how does he choose the things he works on? And he said, you know, when I go to bed and I’m thinking about something and I wake up and I’m still thinking about a lot of times, I know that’s something I have to get I have to work on. And I’ll take the latte factor as an example of this book I’m working on finishing right now. I’ve had that voice in me for 14 years. In 2004, I wanted to do that book after The Automatic Millionaire and for 10 years, Random House, who is my publisher, I would bring it up every year, I want to do this book. And they’d go, no, no, no, do a different book. And so finally I said, I’m going to go write this book and then I’m going to go sell it to someone else if they don’t wanna buy it. And literally, like this book, I went out first time, wrote the book, designed it exactly how I want it, and it’s gonna come out with Simon & Schuster. And so, you know, 14 years, there was that voice inside me that just said, you have to go do this book, you have to get this message out. And I don’t think I’m unique in that way, right? That’s the way entrepreneurs are. There’s always something, and I think when you’re called to do something, it’s you’re called from a higher power. Paulo Coelho calls it your personal legend. And I love if you haven’t read if you haven’t read The Alchemist, everybody should go read The Alchemist. It’s like the greatest book ever written on the show. That’s Alchemist. Yeah, The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho. And I went out and met with Paulo Coelho in Geneva because he’s like my idol in terms of authors. He’s sold like 150 million books and his stories have translated all over the world. We were out having dinner and then we were out having a lot of drinks. I think it was around 2 in the morning and Paulo turned to me and said, ìWhat is the book that you have written that you need to write?î I start telling him about the Latte Factor. I go, ìPaulo, I want to write this book that will translate all over And he looks at me and he goes, well then David, you must write that book. So that was 2012. So, you know, it’s gonna come out, it’s gonna come out in May 7th, 2019. I have a Bible verse I wanna give you that you’d probably don’t want from me because I’m certainly not a biblical prophet, but Colossians 3, 23, 24, to me explains the career of David Bach. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for human masters. Since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. David, thank you for serving. Thank you for helping. I appreciate you so much. And we like to end the show with a boom, which stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. And so we like to count it down. Chumper, are you ready to count it down? Let’s do it. David, are you ready to bring the boom here? Yeah, boom, man. I love it. Here we go. Here we go. Three, two, one, boom! My name is Josh Feldman. I am originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The conference is amazing. It lists all of the things in very specific steps that you need. It’s very actionable. You come away with everything you need to know, what you need to know, how you need to do it. It’s fun. It’s an intense experience. You absolutely have to do it. It’s amazing. It gives clarity to things that are maybe a little bit vague as far as understanding. You come away from the conference knowing exactly what you need to do. Boom. Shake the room, Fire Nation. the world. to year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark at Thrivetimeshow.com. Start building an army of loyal affiliates and brand ambassadors who constantly promote your products today. The step-by-step is waiting for you on my buddy Russell Brunson’s new podcast miniseries, Traffic Secrets. Open your podcast app and subscribe to Traffic Secrets now or visit TrafficSecretsPodcast.com. Clay, say what’s up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don’t know. Fire Nation, what is going on? I hope you’re having a great start to your day or a great day. And fun fact is I wear the same thing every single day. Paint us a picture. What does that look like? Forever I used to wear a red tie with a white shirt and a blue suit. I had a certain economic goal that once I hit a certain goal level I would begin to never wear that again. So now I wear and one basketball shorts which you too can buy for about 15 bucks. I wear a pair of Yeezys that clients whenever they hit their financial goals, I have a will work for Yeezys program where people mail me Yeezys as a thank you gift. I wear a hat that says Boom on it, and I have a jersey that says Boom on it. It’s a custom jersey. And on the back, it has my wife’s name on it, Vanessa, and the number 99, because that’s when I graduated from high school. Amazing. I’m actually a 98 high school grad, so we’re right back to back, brother. I definitely love this. And Fire Nation, as you know from my great introduction of Clay, we’re going to be talking all about guaranteed success. Why you must know and complete your daily KPIs or your dream will die. Little dramatic but true. And Clay, you’ve been on Entrepreneurs on Fire before and every single time you have just brought so much energy, so much value that of course you’re bringing you back on again because listen, you’re the founder of several multi-million dollar businesses. You are a business coach to over 160 clients who have a combined value that now exceeds $2 billion. Why, I must ask you, why do your clients grow on the average of 104% a year when Inc. Magazine shows that 96% of small businesses will fail within 10 years? First off, for your listeners out there who are smart and discerning people. If you go to Thrivetimeshow.com and you click on the testimonials button, you can see these people and hear their stories. But what I do is if you’re going to make, let’s say, an airplane or a building, you probably want to use a blueprint. You probably want to use a proven plan. If you want to make a recipe that actually tastes good, you want to use a – you want to make a smoothie that tastes good, you want to use a recipe. That’s how it works. And what happens is a lot of business owners, for whatever reason, they don’t either know that a blueprint already exists for the building they want to build or the company they want to build. They don’t know a blueprint already exists for the automobile they want to create. And they don’t know a recipe exists for the food they want to make. And therefore, they’re working by guesswork. And I have a proven plan that I create for each and every client. And because our program is month to month, it really is incumbent upon me to make sure that it works for my benefit and for their benefit. I don’t rope people into a longer term deal. There’s nothing wrong with doing a longer term deal, but at the end of the day, it’s month to month. And so my clients, if they don’t have that growth, they’re not going to stick around. And so my average client sticks around for about seven to eight years until they sell their company. And it starts with about an hour long deep dive, what I call a 13-point assessment, where I sit down with them and I go over every possible question I would want to know before making that plan. And it takes me between four and ten hours to make a customized plan for them. This is how you help your clients find that right direction. I mean, you sit down, you do this massive assessment, and now you just know more about them than potentially anybody else in their life, especially when it comes to them and the business end. So once you’ve done this assessment, Clyde, what specifically is your process for making custom business plans for these individuals? Well, I thought we could do is maybe go over a specific client here. Company reached out to me and they were already successful. They were already doing well. And it was called the guy’s name was Josh Feldman. Josh F-E-L-L-M-A-N. He made a lot of money in the IT space. He’d already built multiple successful IT companies, but he kind of wanted to know, how do you create both time freedom and financial freedom? So I go over a 13-point assessment, and that thing, we get into first, what are your goals? Because my goals, I don’t like to travel. I don’t like to wear anything except for the same thing every day. I have a wife and five kids, so my goals are different. Most people listening to this show right now are going, you never want to travel. So this recent travel ban hasn’t impacted me in terms of traveling at all. I don’t go on search, I don’t do group events, and so I do care about our economy, but it hasn’t bothered me. Now some of my clients, their goals are normal. They say, I’d like to travel, or I’d like to maybe not wear the same thing every day. And so we get into, first off, we start off with what are your goals? And then once I know what your goals are, then I go over a very detailed assessment where I talk about your branding. So on a scale of 1 to 10, if 10 means your branding is like Tesla, it’s world class, and 1 is terrible. It looks like somebody who did their best, but it wasn’t good enough made it. Then we go over that, we do the rating of that. Then we go over their website, how highly they’re ranking on the search engines on a scale of 1 to 10. If 10 means every time somebody Google searches, and in my case, if you Google search Bill Belichick fan, I always come up top in Google because I am obsessed with Bill Belichick. Somebody else might say, well, if you Google Tulsa cookies, I want to come up top in Google. If you Google Joplin, Missouri gyms, I want to come up top. We go over their rank on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best, one being the worst. Then we go over with them, how many customers do you need to have per day to achieve your financial goals? Most people have never thought about that. Never. Ever. So for me, we have on average, I don’t know, a hundred people a week that reach out for one-on-one business coaching. And I have, I don’t know, two availabilities a week to talk to somebody, and we usually have one availability a month. And so I know for me, I only wanna work with 160 clients so I give them my cell phone number, and then they have coaching calls with our consultants, but I never want to be so busy I can’t respond to their sometimes urgent needs for my program, but somebody else might have thousands of clients There’s nothing wrong with that so you go over your goals And then you go over step three as how many hours per week are you willing to work? Oh? JLD no one has ever asked that question yeah, and For me I like to wake up at 3 in the morning I like to grind until about five, six days a week. Oh, it’s beautiful. And now, again, my wife doesn’t like that, so we’ve agreed on a plan that is Plan B, and that’s called Plan Stay and Married. But when I first got married, I didn’t know that I had to be on the same plan as my wife, and so I worked every hour. And so I’m not kidding, I worked at least, I worked at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV to fund DJConnection.com. connection dot com once the jake ishing at that dot com dot huge and we were america’s largest wedding entertainment company this would be like two thousand four two thousand five i thought people want to pay me to dj yes i shall be jay at the mall of america for kevin garnett store yes i shall be jay in dallas in the same week yes i shall be jay in nashville yes in my wife’s like babe your dj seven nights a week and i’m making a ton of money, baby, for you, for you that I never see. For you, I make it all for you, but I never see you. So we go over the number of hours they’re willing to work, and then we go over, after we’ve done this, we go over what’s your unique value proposition? You know, like your show, for instance. Why I like your show is you always put out good energy. You got good energy, and then you always have practical tips, and you interview people that are vetted and that make sense. That’s what makes you great. But there’s some people’s shows that maybe they’re funny. That’s their niche somebody else’s show Maybe they I don’t know everyone’s got their own niche You gotta figure out in the parking space of in the big parking lot of business Where’s the open parking space and then after that we go over? What is a turnkey marketing system that will create both time freedom and financial freedom for you? So with Josh Feldman, we had to create a system that would allow him to travel around the country in a Winnebago I believe was his stated goal and then return I asked for a pair of Yeezys. And so he got his Winnebago and his Trip, and I got my Yeezys. But then we go through this whole process. After we go over the marketing systems, then we move in and it gets more specific. Now we’re getting into the sales system. Do they have scripts in place? Standardized pricing? Do they record their calls for quality control? Do they track the lead source? Do they have a one sheet? Do they track their conversion percentage? And usually it’s no, no, no, oh I’ve heard about that, but no. And then we go over step eight. What does it cost for you to acquire a new customer? If you spend $1,000 a week on marketing and you get two new customers, it’s $500 a week on marketing. Do you track that? And then we go over repeatable systems. Are all your files backed up? So if you had to shut down your office, like you, how long have you been living in Puerto Rico? Four glorious 4% tax years. Now I understand that you and your incredible lady friend, you like to travel, am I correct? We travel about three months a year. And don’t you do a little Dropbox action or maybe a Google Drive? How do you keep your digital documents organized in the cloud? Yeah, we’re big on the Google Drive. Yeah, so it’s like most of my clients, it’s on a laptop. And if God forbid they lose the laptop, they’ve lost all of the photos of their child before the age of four. There’s like a laptop where it’s like, this laptop is the one where I keep all of my receipts. This laptop over here presents my kids’ birthdays. And I can, I don’t know, only 80% of the time they’ve just recently lost all the files or some of the files and can’t find their passwords. We help them with the file nomenclature. We build the checklists and we make sure these backed up. And then we move on to step 10, managing people. It turns out, when you tell people what to do, they don’t want to do it sometimes because the US Chamber reports that 75% of employees steal from the workplace. A lot of people don’t know that until they hire people. And then we make a sustainable schedule, step 11. Step 12, almost done. Do we make a system for recruiting people? How do you hire, inspire, train, and retain great people? Do they have scripted job posts? No. Do they conduct a weekly interview? No. Do they even know how to lead their team meetings? No. Do they know how to fire somebody? No. Do they know how to motivate somebody? No. So we go over all that, and then the final step, step 13, this is the one where everybody begins to boo me. They don’t like this one. They don’t like this one. They like to boo me every time I even bring up this idea. They like to boo. It’s accounting. Accounting. They don’t know that when you earn more, they’re going to tax you more. And so they’re not, they maybe think they’re living in Puerto Rico where you have sort of a tax haven there. They think they can live like JLD. I mean, where’s the sound effect for tax haven? Come on, you must have something. This is my tax haven, the sound effect. They think they live that, they live in a tax haven, but they don’t. And then I have to point out to them like, Broski, Broseph, ma’am, you’re gonna owe money so you gotta pay that stuff in quarterly. And then they go, oh no. And then I help them automate their savings. And then we wanna set up a give back so they can give back to a cause. So every single time that they help a customer they can also donate to a cause. And then we gotta set them up on a weekly schedule and we gotta repeat this over and over and over until our heads explode. We document it and hopefully we can help them franchise it like we did with tiptopcanine.com or with oxyfresh.com. I mean, Fire Nation, if you are just not fired up about these KPIs, about these 13 different steps, about the in-depthness of this assessment that Clay goes through, I mean, what are you doing right now? This is what successful businesses are built upon. And Clay, we’re going to jump into the break in a couple minutes here, but first off give us a quick example of part of the proven path for one of your clients. You know, I guess maybe we’re going to have Josh come on the mic here in a little bit, which would be pretty cool. So what does that example look like? All the listeners out there do a search right now for Joplin gyms. So J-O-P-L-I-N, Joplin gyms, like Joplin, Missouri. And when you do a search for them, you will see, when you do a search for that term, you’ll see Kola Fitness coming up at the top of the search results. Oh yeah, Jim Joplin, Kola Fitness, experienced the highest and most dot, dot, dot. Now check this out real quick. If you Google Joplin gyms, Kola Fitness comes up top in the search results, or in the top three, and then they come up again in the top five. Then they have three videos, so in the first eight places on Google, they have five of those placements on Google, and then their website, and then their Facebook, and they’re beating a great company by the name of Planet Fitness. They’re destroying Planet Fitness. And Planet Fitness is a huge company! And so it’s like David and Goliath! And so Charles Kola says, I am like David. I need, I’m going against Goliath. I’m going against a great company called Planet Fitness. And they’ve got ten times the budget, ten times the size, they have thousands of locations. How can I win? I’m going to win. I’m going to win. I’m going to win. Planet Fitness and they’ve got ten times the budget, ten times the size, they have thousands of locations. How can I win? So I say, we’re going to beat them, here’s the plan. So this is what Charles Kodala has to do every week and here’s a secret and if all the listeners out there can only share it with everybody they know, we’ll just keep it between us and everyone you know. It’s called VISM. Without a VISM, your digital dominance will perish. from happy clients every single day, V, video reviews. And we teach them how to optimize. I, they wanna get images optimized in Google and add them to their site and their Google map every day. S, they wanna write at least 500 words of search engine content every single day for their website. And M, get more Google and Facebook reviews. And that’s their entire marketing plan. That’s it. The I.S.M. and they have gone from one location to two to three and they are dominating not because I’m a genius but because I’ve taken a complicated idea and made it simple. And because they’re not web developers my team built a canonically compliant website for them and we shoot the videos for them. We do the things for them that maybe they don’t have the team to do but they still have to put in that work. Man Man, Fire Nation, we’re not complicating things here. Four steps, VISM, video reviews, images, search engine content, more good Facebook and Google reviews. Now those first three, and I love that you made that point, Clay, every single day, and guess what? Is it super easy to create this content every single day? I mean, it takes work, but guess what? It’s work that Planet Fitness is not putting in, and guess what, they’re losing every single day. The higher the barriers, the lower the competition. Choose and run for those high barriers, Fire Nation, because your competition will be distanced if you can even see them at all. So Fire Nation, Charles Cola is gaining all this traction because he’s focusing on these points, this VISM, and he is working on the key performance indicators in making things happen. And Fire Nation, we’re about to take a break. When we get back, we actually have one of Clay’s clients in the studio, Josh Fellman. And I just can’t wait for Clay, you to introduce this guy, tell us a little bit about him, and then we’re actually going to bring Josh on because he’s going to give his honest assessment of his process with Clay as well. So don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee? Fire Nation, meet Clay Clark. Clay has been coaching businesses just like yours since 2006. Yup, even through the Great Recession, and he does it for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee. At a time when Inc. Magazine reports that by default, 96% of businesses will fail within 10 years, Clay is helping businesses like yours to grow on average by 104% annually. You might be wondering, how is this even possible? Well, Clay only takes on 160 clients, which means he’s able to personally design your business plan. Plus, Clay’s team helps you execute that plan with access to graphic designers, Google certified search engine optimizers, web developers, online advertising managers, videographers, workflow mappers, and accounting coaches to help you get on top of your numbers. Visit thrivetimeshow.com slash fire to see thousands of video testimonials from real clients who Clay has helped over the years. Then schedule your free consultation with Clay himself to see how he and his team can help you thrive. That’s thrivetimeshow.com slash fire. One of the biggest struggles we face as online business owners is building an audience. Getting traffic to your website, podcast, videos, social media channels, it’s not easy. But there’s a framework that you can start using right now to consistently drive your dream customers to your business every day. Want that framework? Great news, Fire Nation. My buddy, Russell Brunson, is a co-founder of ClickFunnels and has grown his business to a near $1 billion valuation using traffic driving strategies as a backbone of his business. And fortunately for the rest of us, he’s one of the most generous people I know in the online business world. He just created a new podcast mini series called Traffic Secrets to help you learn exactly how to borrow traffic from influencers in your industry, how to build an army of loyal affiliates and brand ambassadors who constantly promote your products, how to effectively build an email list and so much more. Open your podcast app and subscribe to Traffic Secrets now or visit TrafficSecretsPodcast.com. So Clay, we’re back and man, so much value in the first segment of this podcast episode and so much more coming because I mean, you like to do things in a different kind of way, Clay, which I love. And you actually brought one of your clients into the studio so that we can have like a real conversation with him. So it’s not just like me and Clay just talking about how awesome Clay is because of course he is and that’s reality, but let’s bring on somebody else. So set the stage, Clay. Who do you got for us? What are we going to be talking about? Let’s chat. Quick funny story here. After I achieved financial freedom and time freedom and I’d sold some businesses, I found out that the mayor in my town was running unopposed. This woman wanted to run unopposed. And I know your audience has all different political leanings, but the point is we were on different sides of the aisle. And I got a chance to know her because she presented me with the Entrepreneur of the Year Award. So I knew this lady and I jokingly said, well, I’m going to run against you. She said, well, you should. And I said, I will. And I did. And so this guy, Josh, saw me running for mayor of my town at the age of, I think, 26 at the time. That’s how we first met. And then we didn’t really reconnect, I want to say, Josh, for how long until we reconnected? It was probably, what, 10 years maybe, or maybe eight years? Or how long was it? At least that. What year was that? That was 2000 and… I don’t even know. It was a long time. I was at JLD probably eight years, seven years, something like that. And long story short, he’s a bearded man. He’s a man with a beard. His website is 500kmsp.com, 500kmsp. He does IT consulting, and he also owns other companies. And so that’s how I met Josh, and we’ve been working together. Josh, how long have you been stuck with me? Going on two years now. Oh, two years. He says it with great hesitation. Two years now? It’s not the worst year. I pulled my track and shoot. It’s been about two years. Okay. One thing I want to do here, Clay, because I just think it’s really fun and really different and really exciting and this is something I actually have not done in over 25 episodes of Running Entrepreneurs On Fire here, is I kind of want to have you kind of take over the hosting part for the rest of this episode and walk Josh through the process. You know, ask him questions. I’ll be here to kind of like say a couple of things, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but let’s be honest. You’ve rocked the Michael and Entrepreneurs on Fire before. You’re a current awesome sponsor of the show because you know the value of Fire Nation and what we’re doing and I want Fire Nation to get to know a little bit more about you, not just as the interviewee, but you know, as a great host that you are for your own show and now on Entrepreneurs on Fire. So take Josh through these next few things we want to talk about and I’m going to kind of hand off the controls. I’m still here. I’ll still be yapping in, but take it away, brother. Yeah. So Josh, how long have you been a self-employed person before you and I ever started coaching together? Since the age of at least eight years old, my mother convinced me to deliver cookies door to door and to the local Ace Hardware and cookies and they like lunch and so I would trot myself down there to the Ace Hardware and sell cookies. And where did you have your first traction where you thought, you know what, I may win as an entrepreneur. When did you have your first big win as an entrepreneur? How old were you approximately and what were you doing? Well, it was in 2008 I decided to start a third IT company. It turns out 2008 is a great year to start a company. Yes. For specifically IT companies because companies fire their IT people and hire somebody that’s half the cost. And so we did really well during a recession. Got it. So when I was in business school, school was in the way of me making money, but there was one thing I did take out of school, which is revenue generating activities for businesses. Most businesses have sales and most businesses have service and IT is an oddity in that it has a third revenue producing vehicle that is a recurring revenue website hosting backups. And so I thought that was an oddity and I’ve been able to make a lot more money than a typical business because it’s more revenue. So for the listeners out there of this great show, great program that aren’t familiar with what it’s like to be stuck in a room with me. First off, talk about the growth you’ve experienced, and then talk about what it’s like to be stuck in a room with somebody who only goes 95 miles an hour while being laser focused. So let’s go with what kind of growth have you had? Have you grown a little bit? Well, and since April of, let’s see, that would be April of last year, so we’re coming up on April of this year. So in two years, I’ve gone from, I reached out to Clay to help develop me as a coach. I had some knowledge as a technician, and I needed to know how do I communicate this to another human being using words? And he’s taught me how to be funny, how to communicate this to somebody else where they actually understand it. And so, almost two years ago, I asked him to help me create an IT coaching company to communicate some knowledge that I had learned. And we went from zero revenue to we’re billing almost $40,000 a month in coaching. So from zero revenue to $40,000 a month? Right. I think we were at 30. You can pull up my tracking sheet if you want to, but I think we were at $35,000 a month. But we’ve closed two more clients. And then you have other businesses too. Don’t you have like an arcade? So when I sold my third IT company in 2017, I was approached by three individuals who had made some significant amount of money, but they didn’t know what to do with it. And they asked myself and my business partner to help either acquire or grow companies for them. So essentially, I now am the president of a small venture capital fund where we started, to date we’ve started two companies. One is an arcade and bar in McKinney, Texas. Cool. And the second is we acquired a laundromat. And are they growing too? The laundromat we acquired on paper, it was supposed to have a cash on cash return based on the money I put into it. It was supposed to make a 14% net profit. Sure. And it is currently making a 28% net profit. Oh, yes. I’m going to give myself a mega point right there. I live for these mega points. Mega point. Mega point. Oh, I love mega points. I love mega points. Now, what is the worst part and the most difficult part of having me work with you every week? Because I think people out there, they say they want to grow. I have never served in the military like JLD did. But it’s kind of like a boot camp is how people tell me. They say it’s kind of like, I don’t know, you show up and you thought maybe it was going to be like going to Disney World and all of a sudden a drill sergeant shows up, but you’re paying him somehow. Can you explain what it’s like to be stuck in a room with me? Josh, I will protect you as well, brother. I’m a tank commander. I’ve been to Iraq. I’ll make it happen. So whatever you say, I want to hear the best, but I also want to hear the worst. unique ability to speak truth to you and you’re thankful for it and you want to come back for more and you feel disappointed to let him down. Lulius Sotheway is for me. I’ve learned some specific things in communicating knowledge to somebody else. You have to be funny or you won’t be Boring will put you out of business. Oh, it will. Oh, it’s not good. Now, the thing I would say, though, is our team does the back end support for you, too. So we’ve helped you build your website and done your videos and done the launching of the ads. And then he actually, JLD, decided to hire our team to make outbound calls. We do that as a service for our clients, outbound calls, on behalf of your company to help you acquire clients. So we were actually the marketing vehicle that called and we charged $25 an hour and I think we were doing about 10 hours a week of calls for you. I think at the peak maybe doing 40 hours a week of calls. I believe that’s correct. Could you maybe explain the value of having a call center that’s making calls for you that you don’t have to employ beyond anything beyond just a month-to-month relationship? Yeah, and let me just break in before even Josh answers and just say, imagine that, like not having to go out, find, hire, train, and then like overlook. I mean, $25 an hour, you’re literally handed a call center for as many hours as you want. Mind blown, Josh, go ahead. Yeah, so it’s immensely valuable for someone who can do their own cold calling to a certain extent, although Clay has a unique way of mentoring talent that exceeds even something that somebody who’s been in sales for a number of years would be able to accomplish. But specifically for me, I have leads sent to me that I can simply reach out to at an appropriate time. They’ve already set an appointment for me. They set somewhere between two and four appointments for me a week, which is right about where I want to be. And I simply call them and close. And the calls are recorded for quality assurance too, so you can listen to the calls, and we made a script together, but then you listen to the calls every week and provide feedback on it. I wanna get into this, because I don’t want the wrong person to reach out to me and say, I thought I was gonna be talking to a Build-A-Bear representative, and I ended up talking to Chuck Norris. I mean, Co, could you kind of explain what person would not be a good fit to reach out to us? Because I want everybody who’s listening to this show to be blessed. There’s a lot of programs that are a good fit, but I don’t want the wrong person reaching out. So if you are a, what Clay refers to as a happy hoper, if you’re looking for a magic pill for somebody just to do it for you, but you’re unwilling to follow up, they’re gonna set leads for you, and then you’re not gonna follow up, and then you’re going to blame the leads and it’s your fault because you didn’t follow up. What I did here, JLD, to make it easier for your listeners is I made a landing page called Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EO fire, Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EO fire and I asked if my 160 clients would be willing to allow me to share their website address, their first name and last name and the actual growth percentage at which they grew last year, so you can see the roster and see if they’re like you or not. And currently, last year, the average client grew by 104%. Well, put that there for all your listeners and that way they can see. And my final, I think I wanted to see if you could share is, you know I only work with 160 clients. Correct. And people hear that and they go, no you don’t. You’re gonna take on any client there is. And you’ve seen me, because you’ve shadowed me. I allow all my clients to shadow. You’ve seen me tell someone they’re not a good fit. Why do you believe that I only take on 160? I mean, there’s a math to it at JLD. We have 47 employees full-time that help to support our clients, but could you maybe explain why we only take on 160 from your perspective? Because it hurts your head to deal with a lame-ass every day. Oh, Shonda, that was right there. Oh, man. Oh, OK. All right. Flashbacks in the booth. Back to you in the booth. You know, Fire Nation, there’s a reason why. Number one, I want to have Clay back on. Autumn is on fire. I mean, he absolutely crushed it earlier in the year. And you responded in a massive way because he gave an incredible offer. And you guys just took it up, you know, to the next level. And then Clay and I were chatting, and he’s just like, yo, your audience resonates so well with me and my brand and what I do. He’s like, I wanna get in front of your audience more. Like, I wanna sponsor the show, which is obviously why Clay’s sponsoring this show that we’re talking about right now that you heard during the pre-roll, the mid-roll, and you’ll hear during the post-roll. But also, you may be hearing from him a lot over the next year on Entrepreneurs On Fire, because he’s just got his system down He knows who his core audience is and he knows that you fire nation are right up his alley So clay, why don’t you maybe talk about the opportunity that fire nation has and it’s a limited opportunity Let’s be honest because you only work with 160 clients So what do you want fire nation to really get from this conversation that you and I had during the first part of the show? Obviously the great conversation that Josh added to as well. Take it away. Well I would just say Christina Niemus with Cape Cod Auto Body and Detailing dot com is one example. I believe she heard of me through you, that’s my understanding today. And she’s based in the Boston area and she said could you shoot a commercial that will get traction? I said sure. So one of our employees has a bulldog named Chauncey and we had Chauncey mouth the words and then I do the Boston accent and she gets the leads. She said, ìCould you get us to the top of Google?î I said, ìSure.î ìCould you say, could you help me make checklists?î I said, ìYep.î But it all started with a 13-point assessment. So if you go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EO fire, thatís Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EO fire, youíre going to go there and if you fill out the form to schedule a 13-point assessment, most people have told me that that assessment alone changes their life. And I say that because when you have more money, as Christina does, she grew by 67% last year, then you can buy back your time. So you can pay a personal assistant to do something, or you can pay someone to mow your lawn, or you can pay someone to get the groceries, or you can just afford to pay for health care. So again, I’m not talking about, I’m not a big feelings guy, and there’s a lot of great guests you’ve had on your show that talk about motivation and alignment and a lot of things that really do matter. What I’m looking for are people that say, I am motivated, I’m fired up, I just need to have a linear path. So we do the 13-point assessment for you, and that alone is a life-changing thing for people. But then also we do a complete web analysis. When you reach out and schedule a 13-point assessment, we always do a free complimentary web analysis. Now this web analysis is something that I used to charge well over $1,500 for. I used to charge about $2,000 to $1,500, depending on how big the site was. And the only thing I can compare it to would be if you go to bruceclay.com, he’s a great podcast guest of mine I’ve had. He writes Search Engine for Dummies every year. Or Gary Grant with SEO Inc., he charges between four and six thousand a month. These are great people that their whole business is doing search engine optimization. But because I own actual companies, helping you grow your company is sort of like my hobby, it’s what I do for fun. And so I use my team that works with my companies to help you with your business. So in a way, business coaching for me is more of like my calling than it is my profit center. And so because of that, we can have our team pull a battery of reports and tell you specifically what’s wrong with your website behind the scenes. Because it might look great, it might have a great visual look to it, but as you and I know, if the title tags are wrong, or if the keywords are wrong, if the XML site map is wrong, if the site speed is wrong, if you don’t have enough words on every page if you don’t have if you have a duplicate content I mean there’s just all these things that are wrong and so we’re gonna do the assessment for you for the low low price of a free which is a shocking number then we’re gonna do a web a complete web audit for you for free then I’m gonna tell you at least two or three bad jokes if you get to the vetting process for free nothing says I love you more than bad jokes. You’re going to leave going, that guy’s weird. Man I learned a lot. You get all that stuff. And then I made an e-book copy. We have written over a dozen books. And so I made a free e-book copy available for all of your listeners. Again by going to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EOfire. You can download my Search Engine Domination book, which has been a bestseller on Amazon for the past year. You can download that for free. You could download the Art of Getting Things Done for free. And these are some of these books have been Amazon best sellers. You can download the e-book version all for free. You get bad jokes for free. You get a web assessment for free. You get the 13-point assessment for free. I mean, really, it’s just, it’s a lot of free. And the only way you could possibly pay me, and by the way, if you do pay me, it’s $1,700 a month. And you say, well, why is it $1,700 a month? Because I operated a 20% profit margin. So I’m going to make an outstanding $340 per month to provide all that value for you on a month-to-month basis. And I’m very transparent about that. And we do have a scholarship program for client in need, and we do two clients a month like that, where we help you out at a discounted rate, where we kind of meet you where you’re at. I don’t like to do that for every client because it wouldn’t be financially sustainable. But if all your listeners will Google Joplin Gyms, you can see our handiwork. If you Google Tulsa Cookies, you can see Barbie Cookies, and you can see that handiwork. If you Google search Satellite Beach Pizzeria, you can see Papa Gallo’s, you can see our handiwork. Or if you just go to thrivetimeshow.com and you click on Testimonials, you can see, check this out, over 1,000 current or former clients sharing their testimonials about how the system worked. But remember, nothing works unless you do. Maya Angelou said, nothing works unless you do. So you gotta be a doer. Don’t just be a hearer. Don’t think this is a TED Talks. This is like a TED Talks with a follow up. Okay, folks, we’re gonna follow up. That’s what it’s all about. Fire Nation, Clay walks the walk, he talks the talk. That’s why I brought him back on the show. That’s why I agreed to have him as a sponsor because I am so obsessed with my sponsors only delivering amazing value to you, Fire Nation. So believe me, I know Clay delivers. And Clay, in closing, I just want to ask you this question. I think it might be on some of Fire Nation’s minds and I just really want to give you the stage once again to take this home, to close it down and then we’ll say goodbye and that is you’ve long ago achieved financial freedom, achieved time freedom and that’s amazing things. A lot of people who are listening might be like, why is this guy not on a beach in Puerto Rico just like sipping Mai Tais and like just relaxing? What motivates you to coach your clients? What is the real reason? I believe and I know it is entirely possible to go to college, to earn a degree, and to learn very little about how to earn money. In fact, as a general rule, most of the general education out there is kind of like memorizing the history channel. It’s like you learned a lot about the Byzantine Empire and it might be fascinating, but it’s not wealth-creating. I grew up in a home where my dad delivered pizzas at Domino’s. He worked the night shift at Quick Trip convenience stores to pay the bills. I sincerely mean this. I thought that my father didn’t like me until I was able to hire him when I was 27 years old. And I was talking with my dad, and I’m like, dad, why were you always working? He’s like, to put food on the table. Now my dad has a college degree from Oral Roberts University. And imagine what that felt like as a kid, and a lot of your listeners can relate to this. My dad just worked his ass off constantly because he wanted to provide. But my dad wasn’t one of those dads who comes home and goes, that’s right, I’ve been working for you. He was a quiet guy. He just worked. And from the age of 27, when I hired my dad, he’s like, what am I gonna do for you, son? I said, you can just come be a dad. I’ll put you on payroll. You can help me with the books. I need someone I can trust. He moved from Minnesota to Tulsa to come work with me and when he died of Lou Gehrig’s on September 5th, three years ago, I can honestly say I had no regrets. I got all that time with my dad and there’s so many people out there that are exchanging all their time for very little money. And that just makes zero sense. If you’re gonna go out there today and hire a minimum wage employee, let’s say you’re in the great state of Michigan or something, okay? You hire an employee for 12 bucks an hour, 11 bucks an hour. Let’s say you’re in Oklahoma, you hire someone for 7.25 an hour. If you hire somebody for 12 an hour after payroll taxes and they work for you 40 hours a week for 4.3 weeks a month. That means that you’re going to pay that person $2,064 a month before factoring in payroll taxes and providing them an office and all the costs of hiring them and finding them and recruiting them. You know what I mean? There’s a lot of costs, hidden costs associated with hiring somebody. For less money than it would cost you to hire even one full-time minimum wage employee, we can change your life and we will change your life. And I am serious about it. My dad recently died and that’s not fun, but man, how terrible would my life have been if I didn’t have certain key mentors in my life? And I’ll tell you this, none of my mentors reached out to me. I had to go pay these people. I paid Michael Levine, the PR consultant for Michael Jackson and Prince and Nike, best-selling author Michael Levine, he worked with Charlton Heston. I paid Home Skillet $25,000 to teach how PR works, $25,000, and it was worth every dollar of it because now I can get my clients like Josh with Living Water Irrigation on the Kelly Clarkson show and the Today show, and I can get clients like OxiFresh on Fox News. I know how to do it now. But $25,000, I paid Bruce Clay, I think it was eight grand a month for 12 consecutive months to learn how search engines work I mean, and I’m glad I did but JLD that’s the money right there I some doubt I paid some money and if I was right now, and I wanted to be a podcaster I’d pay you to learn at a podcast because it turns out you know how to podcast. Heck Yeah, if I didn’t have the motivation to keep podcasting every day I’d pay you whatever that fee is I’d call and go JLD how’d you stay motivated when you had to download the week cuz remember that when you started the Momentum was you before you met Kate you’re getting that momentum going. It’s you against the world You’re recording you got two downloads a week Maybe five a week and then all of a sudden people go. Oh, man must be nice and you go night Okay, yeah, I enjoyed my I do it I enjoyed the process but people don’t see the messy middle the messy middle is the gap between the results that you want to get to and the dream that you just had last night. And somebody has to bridge the gap, and most people who are successful like to travel. Not me. Most people who are successful like to go on vacations. Not me. They like to go to NFL games. Not me. They like to go to parties. Not me. They have hobbies and other interests. Not me. It’s just my wife, my five kids, and growing companies. That’s all I got. If you’re looking for a guy who’s the most interesting man in the world, that’s not me. But I live behind a wall at Camp Clark in Chicken Palace where I myopically focus on my clients and I feel it’s a calling from the Latin word meaning, the word vocation meaning calling. I feel like I’m called to do this and this is what I was called to do. I’m almost 40 years old. I don’t know how many more years I have left on this great planet, but this is what I’m going to do. I’ll be a 70-year-old doing this, and my hero in the game of business is Paul Graham. Paul Graham is my hero. If you Google search Paul Graham, he’s the coach behind Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit, and he was the one who kind of paved the way for what I want to do, and Paul Graham is my inspiration. Fire Nation, if you are literally not pressing pause right now and visiting thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire, check your pulse. I mean, with what Clay just shared, with the immense amount of free value that he’s delivering to you on that site, it’s just unbelievable. The assessment, the website check, the books, all the jazz, his passion transferred to you and your business, injecting it, especially during these crazy times. Fire Nation, this is what you need. Of the five people you spend the most time with, and you’ve been hanging out with CC and JLD today, so keep up that heat and head over to thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. The next stage in your life, Fire Nation, the next stage in your business starts at the end of that URL. Hit it, make it happen. Clay, Josh, thank you both for sharing your truth, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flip side. Take care. Hey, Fire Nation, today’s value bomb content was brought to you by Clay and you know this, successful entrepreneurs, they accomplish big goals. Fire Nation, that’s why I created a journal that helps you do just that. It’s called the Freedom Journal and it gives you that freedom to accomplish your number one goal in 100 days with step by step processes, you name it. Visit thefreedomjournal.com. Use promo code podcast for a $15 discount as a thank you for listening to my podcast and I’ll catch you there Fire Nation or I’ll catch you on the flip side. Looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs just like you to increase their profitability by an average of a hundred and four percent per year all for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark at thrive timeshow.com slash fire thrive timeshow.com slash fire. Alright Thrive Nation I want to tell you a story today about a gentleman I had the opportunity to meet years and years ago and he has really scaled his company. He’s been just a great friend and he’s a guy who money is a magnifier so when you when you help somebody make more money it just makes them more of who they are. He’s a generous man, he’s a hard-working man, he’s actually a CPA. Some people tell me Clay doesn’t a CPA stand for a certified pain in the ass? I don’t think that’s always true folks. There are some good ones out there, and we’re joined here with a long-time client. Paul Hood, welcome to The Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Hey, like my old friend R.D. Mercer said, CPA stands for Certified Professional Ass Kicker, not Certified Pain in the Ass. I’ve got 11 questions for you in about 10 minutes, so here we go. Let’s get it. Let’s get it. How did you and I first meet? I guess maybe when did you and I first start working together? So back in the day, I had a, well, I still do, I have a really nice car and I was sitting at a restaurant and the manager came up and said, hey, do you know this guy, Steve Currington? And I said, no. And I said, why? And he said, well, because he’s got these nice cars and you really need to meet him. So I met Steve and the first time I met him, he was dressed up in a Hulk outfit at a fundraiser yelling, Hulk, smash over the place. And I had been searching, Clay. I had built a business that was doing about $3 million, had about three offices. And I wanted to go from successful to systematic. And I asked Steve, who do I talk to? And he said, you got to meet my guy. And then he got me to one of your workshops. I said, holy smokes, you know, I went to the best, one of the best accounting schools in the country and they didn’t teach anything that you were teaching. So I was lit from the day one. Now, I remember when you came to the conference and watching you take notes, I mean, you were smoking out that, that they had a notebook for taking notes and it was like the piece of paper was gonna set to fire because you were taking so many notes and you were engaging with all the different successful entrepreneurs and I knew that your business was going to scale because previous to meeting me you’d already built a successful business. You were top of your class in college. But I knew you could scale. Just to give the listeners some sort of an idea in their mind, how much have you grown from the time that you and I first met to now? Just to give you some context. Yeah, so last year, Clay, so we went from about $3 million in revenue with three offices to now we have 17 offices across four states. Last year, we did $20 million. We’re poised now. My industry is in a change or die scenario. We are literally fighting off private equity companies that are wanting to throw money at us to be a part of what we’re doing because you helped me create what, in my world they call the platform firm. How do you take a wisdom-based business and scale it?” It was actually pretty simple. It’s actually made me angry. I’ve told you multiple times, I went to college and they didn’t teach me this stuff. You’re saying, have a meeting with your people. What does that mean? You played a massive role in our expansion. Well, Paul, I want to talk to you about this. This might feel like a backhanded compliment, but that’s not the way I mean it. You were graduating near the top of your class. I mean, you have been a very successful accountant before I met you. But I believe that when we met you didn’t have a website. And maybe that seems like it’s a backhanded compliment. I don’t want it to feel that way. I’m saying you were like top of your class CPA, but yet the marketing didn’t match how quality of a service you provided. Maybe I’m getting that wrong. I’d love to get your, just, can you let me talk about that? Because I believe you were a top of the class CPA with a non-existent website. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I hear what you’re saying, Clay. You’re saying is, oh my God, how’d this guy ever become as successful as he was before he met me. But the reality is, again, business school, they teach you how to be a technician. They don’t teach you how to grow a business, how to manage people, how to create leads, how to create that marketing funnel, that sales funnel that goes into it. And when I remember the first time we met individually, you said, well, let’s look at your website. And I said, what website? Because I’m a professional and professionals get new business off of referrals. And dude, you turned on that website and we started getting Google reviews and videos. And I’ll tell you, in the three months of the beginning of this year, my sales team closed 400 new clients in three months, all off of inbound calls, meaning they called us. And that’s all because of what you’ve done with social media, with content, and that website. So bravo. Now, we talk about, you know, one of the things that you did, which I loved, is you, there are what we call passive learners, people that watch information and they don’t think about how to apply it to their lives. Then there’s active learners. You are an active learner. You think, you see something and you think, how can I apply this to my life? And so I remember when you came to the workshop, you almost immediately, we started talking about renovating your offices on the outside and the inside. So basically renovating the brand, like the website, the digital marketing, but also renovating the way your physical CPA practices looked in inside. I think in your Claremore office, you renovated your Claremore office. I’m going to try to pull it up on the screen so people can see this. But you actually implemented so many of the things quickly. And so you actually went through the process of renovating your office inside and outside. Why did you decide to renovate your office on the inside and the outside after having been to workshops and conferences? Why did you decide to do that? Because very few people do that. Well, it was two things, Clay. The first thing is when I had clients come into me and they’d say, you know, they’d rather go to their dentist than see me. And you know, people buy what they want, not what they need. And we were selling what they needed, not what they wanted. portray a success-minded, an anti-CPA environment, if you will, with the slogans and the positive saying and the financial things. It’s kind of weird, though, Clay, because if you compare your office and my office, they strangely look alike. I’m not saying I copied off of you, but they strangely look alike. Well, you know, and the other thing- We want to sell success. We don’t want to just do tax returns. We want to sell success, and that’s what I jumped all over going to you. I told you one time, Clay, I could like live in your office. It’s the success and the positive and the motivation that’s created, and so I wanted to recreate that in my offices. Now, other things that you implemented successfully, and again, I’m just trying to brag on some of the wonderful things you’ve been able to accomplish, is you and I talked and you said, Clay, I have a desire in my heart to write a book. And so you and I worked together on writing your first book, Take a Look Under the Hood, which is a phenomenal book there. You and I did that together. And then the next book here is called Roadkill Tastes Like Chicken. And again, I can’t help somebody to typeset a book or to make a cover if someone doesn’t write the book. And so you are willing to put in the work and then we were able to work together to produce the end result. What would you say to somebody who’s on the outside of the website right now who’s thinking about becoming a client of ours and we have sort of a, our business is designed, I only take on 160 clients and so I work with a lot of the same people year after year after year. So what would you say about the amount of effort you had to put in to something like the website or writing the book? And then maybe what would you say about how, what kind of work we put in, just so you kind of explain how that relationship works. Yeah, Clay, I’m still astonished at what all you guys were willing to do. You took and you proved to me that you can do this with any business. A business that wants to grow, a business that wants to be seen, a business that wants to measure profitability, a business that wants to start with the end in mind, you have all the tools to do that. And again, I’m Clay, I’m waiting for the check in the mail, but you’re not paying me to say this stuff. It’s reality. And I always said, and we’ve sent you a lot of clients over the years, that you’re the offense, I’m the defense, you show them how to make it, I show them how to keep it. I wrote the first book, really, frankly, you wrote most of the book. I went through, you did a lot of stuff, and I added some burbage and made it more towards CPA, the defense side, if you will. And in the second book, you taught me that it’s not about making money. It’s about sowing seeds. It’s about changing people’s lives. It’s about one of the first things that you and I talked about is why am I wanting to do this? What’s the intent? What difference am I going to make in the world? And with wealth, when you create wealth, you get attention, and therefore people give you credibility and they’re more apt to do what you advise. And I have a great lifestyle, but what I wanted to do is, with the book, with you, with my business, is how do I break generational sin or generational punishment? Or in my book, I call it, pigs don’t know pigs think, because if my mom hadn’t made a change and said no to being abused and alcoholism, I’d probably be some drunk Indian smacking a woman around. It wouldn’t be my wife because she’s German, she’d cut me, she’d hurt me. Now I’ve got a college degree and all my kids have college degrees. It’s beyond just… I feel like people owe it not only to themselves, to their community, to their family, to people they don’t even know, to be successful and to sow those seeds of success into other people. And frankly, Clay, I admire you. I am astounded by your knowledge and how you can take a business from where I was to where I am now. And it’s all about sharing life’s successes because you can create wealth and benefit the world. But if you can teach other people to create wealth and how to benefit the world, that’s amazing. So bravo to you, Clay. I appreciate that very much. I have three final questions for you. Three final questions. I want to tap into your wisdom on this. One of the things about your business that blew my mind is that if we typed in Tulsa CPAs into Google or whatever market you’re in, we couldn’t find you. So it’s kind of hard for people sometimes to grasp the idea that the best accountant isn’t findable, that the best dentist isn’t findable. People typically, they go to Google, they type in the search term, and whatever comes up top, that’s who they call. And I wanted to ask you if you could share about the impact that search engine optimization maybe has had on your business, because I think a lot of dentists, doctors, lawyers, photographers, web developers, people I meet at conferences, we just had a big conference with Tim Tebow last week, I meet these people who are the best chiropractor in their area, the best neurosurgeon, the best whatever, and people can’t find them. Could you talk about the impact that the search engine optimization has made on the business? It’s immeasurable, Clay. You know, earlier I had mentioned, we brought in like 400 new clients organically in three months, two and a half months. All of them were what’s called inbound liens, meaning they reached out to me. They weren’t referred to me by another client. They were actually Googled CPAs and they looked at reviews and videos. And so when you and I first met, I said, people don’t look for CPAs on Google. They call their friends or whatever. And you smiled and shook your head and said, okay. And you set out to prove me wrong and you did. And so anybody, especially in the service business, you can call me and I’ll tell you that I didn’t believe Clay Clark for a minute, but it has magnified the reach that we have. And what it’s done for us, Clay, it’s allowed us to be selective on what clients we take. And these clients are calling us. They literally, we don’t have to pick up the phone and call them, they’re calling us. And it’s 100% off of Google, Google reviews, Google searches. So I’ll admit it right here, you proved me wrong. People do look for CPAs off of Google. They look for doctors, dentists, attorneys as well. Now my final 90 seconds here for you in the hot seat, you know, the conferences, Dr. Zellner participates in the conferences. You know, we’ve had Tim Tebow, Michael Levine, we’ve had the head of Harley Davidson. I mean, over the years we just continue to bring in new folks. But when you get past the big names, could you maybe describe what the conferences are like or what kind of an impact have the conferences had on your business? Yeah. So the main thing is, you know, as a business owner, you know, there’s plenty of times I felt like I’m alone. You know, there’s nobody that thinks like me. You know, I’ve got great staff, but they go home at the end of the day, and you fight negativity and all that. And you don’t know what you’re doing. Nobody taught me how to be a successful business owner in business school. And then I go to your workshop. It’s positive. I’m surrounded by forward, positive thinking, hardworking, success-minded people. And then you start laying out the very simplistic methodologies because, Clay, you taught me there is a pattern to success, and here’s what you do. And in your workshops, for the private… My gosh, you need to quadruple the cost of that going in there because if somebody… Now, here’s what I really like about it. I’m not an excuse maker. I don’t make excuses. And a lot of people like to go and, oh, I can’t do it. I don’t know what I’m doing. Or my mama couldn’t, my dad couldn’t, so I can’t. And your workshops take all excuses away. All you got to do is be willing to put in some effort and show up. There’s a pattern to success. It’s teachable. It’s replicatable, and it’s engaging. I would absolutely recommend anybody and everybody to go to your workshop because one, you’re going to walk out of there, you’re going to be on fire, you’re ready to go. But Clay, you give practical steps on what to do. And all I got to do is do it, and that’s what I did, even though I didn’t believe you. You proved me wrong, and here we are, we’re five times the size we were when, seven times almost, the size we were when we met you a few years ago. Final question for you. People, when they think about growing a business, they think about sales, they think about marketing, they think about accounting, they think about workflow, they think about human resources, they think about public speaking, they think about PR, they think about social media ads. And people always ask me, they go, okay, so you help people with workflows, or they’ll go, okay, so you’re the website guy, or you’re the book writing guy, or you’re the whatever guy. How would you describe what it is that our business coaching platform does or what it’s done for you? So what you’ve done for me and what I’ve seen you do for clients is you clearly define the success pattern. The success pattern that you taught me is you define where you’re at, you define where you want to go, you create a plan, you execute the plan, you measure results, you modify the plan. In that plan, there’s a lot of consistencies, no matter if you’re a pool business, if you’re a lawn business, or you’re a CPA. And so what you did was, and I’m a proponent of going to college, especially the CPA, you have to. But if I didn’t have to, I could have skipped all that crap and hung out with you for a couple of years and learned every step of the way. Because every business that I’ve sent to you or that I work with, maybe they’re good in this area, but they are not good in these areas. And so to be able to bring the thing full circle, regardless, and Clayton, and again, this is a compliment. You’ve done this with many, many different businesses. So you’re the guy that takes away excuses. If you want to be successful, there’s a pattern, show up, do the work, modify your plan, and reap the rewards. Paul, I really do appreciate you. I want people to know about the resources that you provide. You have a wonderful team there at hoodcpas.com. Hoodcpas.com. We have typically about a million listeners that will listen to this show on a typical week or every couple of weeks. What are the solutions that you provide there at paulhood.com? Paulhood.com. Well, so what we do is we’re different than most CPAs because my industry is in a really a change or die scenario. 75% of CPAs are at or above retirement age. There’s about 90% of the firms that are out there are potential acquisition targets. So what we have to do is we have to re-envision, and you help me with this, re-envision what we do. We sell success, Clay, just like you do. We’re not marketing people, though. So like I said, you’re the offense, we’re the defense. We teach people how to minimize their income tax, how to maximize returns, how do you keep more, save more, and protect more? And we do it in a format, Clay, that’s a membership type model to where it’s a fixed fee. So every time you call us, you’re not getting a bill. And same thing, it’s very predictable. Keep more, save more, protect more, not just do your tax return. Paul, I really do appreciate you carving out time to join us today again, folks. That’s paulhood.com. You say, what’s that website? It’s paulhood.com. If you need a CPA in a major way, check out paulhood.com. Paul Hood, thank you so much for your time today, sir. We’ll talk to you soon. See you, brother. See you. Bye-bye. My name is Paul Hood, and I’m from right here in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I’m a CPA with offices in Bartlesville, Tulsa, and Claremore. I originally heard about the Thrive Time Workshop through some friends, a guy named Steve Carrington, who has a very successful business. He said, if you want to be successful, you need to be here. My business, it consists of a CPA and a financial advisor, and we’re very successful. I want to go from successful to systematic. I want to learn systems and processes so that the business can run without me. The atmosphere here at Thrive and Clay’s office and the team very positive, very proactive, very forward-looking. They have very specific things that they can offer. Clay’s delivery is very unique. He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, but he’s also one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met, so he combines those in a very, very awesome way. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned at the workshop is to be very deliberate, to be very specific, to have a plan in mind and then they can help you put together the processes to get it done. A favorite aspect is probably just how entertaining it is and the fact that I pick up one or two or three things every time I come to take my business to the next level. Well, if people are missing out on basically a plan, a guaranteed plan pretty much if you’re willing to work it to be successful. Most people, I think everybody should attend one of these workshops at least once because you don’t know what you don’t know. And we’re not taught to be successful in school. What I’ve learned is my college degree is great for preparing me for, to be a technician, but to be a business owner and to create a process or a business that can continue without me, I’m not there. I’ve been looking at it, looking for such processes for a while. And what Clay is showing me is how to do that step by step. Well, I’ve enjoyed the entire workshop. What I’ve liked the most is Clay’s presentation style. You go to seminars. I’m 49. I’ve gone to seminars for 30 years. And this is the first seminar I’ve gone to that is entertaining, both entertaining and it’s very usable information. The atmosphere of Tribe Headquarters is really actually kind of convincing me to change the atmosphere of my offices, even though they’re traditional CPA practices. non-inviting environment here, I want to come back. When I came here a few weeks ago, I couldn’t wait to come back. Clay’s presentation training style is really like nothing I’ve seen before. Most business seminars I’ve gone to, suit and tie, very, you know, try to stay awake, drink a bunch of cups of coffee, but Clay’s very entertaining, and the information he has is, I haven’t heard before, I’ve heard pieces of it, but the way he puts it together in a total package and his presentation style is both entertaining and very knowledgeable. Well, I guess what people are missing out if they don’t come to Thrive Conference, it depends on them. You know, if they like working 60, 70 hours a week and barely getting by or making a decent money, but you can’t replace your time, that’s fine. If you’re a position like me, you make good money, but you like to buy back your time. You’d like to still make the money, but not have to show up, not have a business that’s dependent upon you showing up. Coming here, if you don’t come here, you’re not going to get that. What we’re going to do today is we’re going to give you a little tour of the house that we just bought. In Oklahoma, this is what we call a big old house. So come on in and check this out. We bought this house about a year and a half ago. And we’ve been finishing it. It was partially constructed. And so everything’s under construction. So this is kind of a sneak preview for everybody. So follow me. This right here is the living room, family room, whatever you want to call it. It’s got a bar for watching football, of course. Go Cowboys. It’s got 50-foot ceilings, windows out to the pool, really, really nice kitchen over here. We flew the Ben Hood in from Mexico. It was handmade. Let’s go this way. This is a really unique room. There’s a six-story tower in the middle of the house. Don’t know why. It’s got six rooms straight up top. You can go 85 feet in the air, shoot deer, take pictures, whatever you want to do. See the sunrise, sunset. This will be a photography studio, actually. But you see, it’s got 25, 30-foot ceilings up here. It’s got a… We had to get a special permit. It’s got an elevator that goes up six floors. Normally in a residence, you can only get like a three or four story elevator. Again, just six rooms like this on the third floor. I’m going to have I suck at golf. I love golf, but I suck at golf. And we’re going to have a golf simulator up there so I can play golf for 30 minutes. I get mad. I can leave, but it’s all inside and air conditioned over here off of the photography studio. There’s actually a safe room. It’s all concrete walls. We had a steel door made for it, and so tornadoes come, or people we don’t really care, you know, whatever, it’s a safe room, we can come in, it’s going to have security cameras and everything else in there built in. Now down this hall is my favorite room. Well, there’s two favorite rooms. One, there is a pantry, and there’s a stairwell right there in the back of the pantry that actually leads from my bedroom. So if I want a snack in the middle of the night, it comes straight down from the bedroom. There are 109 interior doors here, 33 exterior doors, 25,000 square feet. It’s got five garages, different garages. This is the best room in the place. We teach success principles at Hood & Associates CPAs, and one of them is just to have balance between your personal life, your finances, your fitness, your friends, your family. And so for fitness I’ve got this. I’ll spend a lot of time in here. And of course right out here, it’s all under construction, there’s stuff everywhere, but about a 70,000 gallon swimming pool. It’s got a swim jet so you can exercise against the current or can make waves. It’s got a huge hot tub that you can to place you can stand in it’ll massage you from your neck to your to your back you know because when you’re out being successful making money you get you get kind of tensed up. It’s got a layout shelf a walk in a beach entry and water shoot never wears got about eight different waterfalls. It’s got a cave in it. It’s got a little lazy river, a little lake thing, pond thing up on top where you can lay out and play in the water. So you know all the necessities of life. Now we’re on the second floor. This is the master suite. It’s actually two stories and has three staircases to the second story, one over here, one there, and then one in another room. It’s got five fireplaces in the whole house, just one here in the master. Second story, the master’s up there, which we’ll go up there here in a minute. This is the master bathroom. Just a little bathroom. If you notice in the shower, there’s no knobs to turn the water on. Everything is digital. We have to have Wi-Fi for it, so it talks to your phone or a tablet. And you program it for Paul’s summer shower, Paul’s winter shower, or what have you. It also in the top there, it’s got a build of where if you want to take a shower in a thunderstorm, it has sound, lightning, thunder, all of that good stuff. I guess that’s the thing, take a shower in a thunderstorm. The bathtub is heated. It’s actually heated, not just the water, but it’s heated. Here is the bathroom and there’s two things in there. I know what that one does. That one is called a bidet. Does anybody know how to work a bidet? I don’t. This is the master closet. One of them. I think there’s six closets, but this is, I don’t know how, this is probably a thousand square feet or give or take. All over here. It keeps going over here. I don’t know who needs that many drawers, but apparently we do. This is the wife’s craft room. She likes to craft. We have grandkids and daughter-in-laws, and this will be full of stuff, and they’ll sit in here and make things and make memories. Of course, it’s off to the balcony. There’s a balcony off to the pool all the way around. Those of you that know me or that will get to know me know I like shoes. And so there’s tons of places to put my shoes in that closet. That’s what I’m excited about. This is, the house has three laundry rooms. This is the master bedroom laundry room. This is just part of the master suite. So we do laundry right here. This is just a little storage room. You know, you got to have a place to put suitcases and shoe boxes and stuff like that. Just a little extra thing. It’s wired for the smart home. So, this is one of the brains. Now, we’re circling back. If you get lost, we’re circling back to the master bathroom. Another closet. Right here is that stairway, I said, that goes down to the pantry in case I want a snack. This room here I’m excited about. This is, we have three grandkids and a fourth on the way, and the house is so big that if our grandkids come and stay with us, we want them to be close. So this is just like an extra bedroom attached to the master suite. Now let’s go upstairs to the second floor of the master. This is a stairway, one of the second or second of three stairways to the second floor. It’s actually third floor of the house, second floor of the master. We think we’re gonna make this a slide because that right there, where we just came from was the grandkids’ bedroom. So they’re gonna be able to come up to our second floor, slide down into their bedroom. What do you think about that? I think that’s a necessity. This is the third story of the house, second story of the master bedroom. This room right here is kind of cool. It’s going to be like a little spa room. We’ve got a commercial tanning bed that goes in there and a massage chair and all the relaxing music and all of that. This would be like a library or reading room off of the master, still part of the master. It’s got a separate balcony out there. Every room in the house is wired for speakers for entertaining. There’s a lot of speakers, I can tell you why. And they suck putting them up. I’d put a bunch of them up but there’s a lot of them these fans are really cool they spin like this and then the fans inside of them spin so it’s got like three different motions going on at once okay we’re now back on the second story of the house over by the tower this is my office this is where my office will be and and then we can go over here and you can see the the second floor of the tower. Now, on the third floor of the tower, I’m going to put a golf simulator, like I said earlier, because I suck at golf, but I want to play. But you can see, we just got to keep our grandkids, because we have three granddaughters. They’ll be OK, but I have a grandson coming. And I know he’s going to want to be climbing. We’re going to have to be careful of that. This is a, this will be just an entertaining room, a game room. There’ll be a pool table here. Kids play Fortnite. Now, over here is when you have a game room, you also got to have a place to have snacks. So, this is our snack kitchen. This is one of three kitchens in the house. Like I say, there’s three laundry rooms, three kitchens. There are 13 bathrooms. This is kind of cool. But this is for entertaining. I was looking to learn how to take my business, like they’ve said today, from being very successful to being systematic. I’ve got a very successful practice in three different cities, make good money. Just want to take it to the next level with systems and processes to where I can drive my cars more. Paul Hood. I’ve been a CPA for 33 years. And what kind of growth have you and your great team had here over the past, let’s say, 5, 6 years? The last 5, when I met you 5 years ago, we were doing 3 million. This year we’ll do 24 million. Which is more than, he’s an accountant, so we’re gonna talk about that. So Paul introduced me to Bob, because he said there’s a guy that came into my office looking to raise some capital, I think that was the thing, and he needed to get some sales going. That’s how sales go, and so if we tell Paul, from the accounting perspective, I’ll pass the mic to you, you do accounting, why do you have to have a website that makes sense and all that branding stuff? How has that impacted your brand, having websites and all those branding things in place? When I met you, like most CPAs, I thought my clients only come from referrals. But we get five leads in a two-month period every month just off of Google. This is my face. We have 17 offices across four states. We have them in every state. This is our face. Like what you were saying, it’s visual. And it also has to say why we’re different. That about us from there is spectacular. And it’s an industry that has changed. We’re modifying it. We’re going to offer our services in a subscript model to where it’s all inclusive. And it’s just been awesome. We’ll determine the level of success. So success in business is not what you know how to do, it’s actually doing it. So the thing that I would tell you is stop it. Get a guy like this guy and let him go after it. It’s insane because then you can be doing what you do well and take that time and invest in something else on top of that as contacts. And I’m not, this is not, I don’t get anything for selling. He’s just telling you what he’s done for us so that we could focus. And then he’ll come in and I’ll say, you know, I think I’ve got it all. And he listens for five minutes and he makes one thing. I want to slap myself in the face. Well, why didn’t I think about that? That’s idiotic. Um, but they’re sick freaks. They just get it, get it, dump. I don’t know, I think it’s just merit-based pay in our office, so the people here, like they get paid. So if we were taking on your account, account and someone else to do this, but if you hired a different marketing company, I’m just giving you best practices. You wanna make sure that they win when you win. So like in our office, if we grow Dave Basie’s podcast, that benefits our company, to the extent it benefits them, but we actually benefit if they benefit. Does that make sense to you? Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crocker, the head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, graphic designers, and web developers. They run 160 companies every single week. Think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. Every 6-8 weeks he’s doing reawaken America tours. Every 6-8 weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from start ups go from start ups to being multi millionaires teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So, amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. And that’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. And Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. My most impressive thing was when I was shadowing him one time, we went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. Anyways, just an amazing man. Anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate any time I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for three months and you have $350,000 of bills you’ve got to pay and we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that. And of course, we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. But he was a great man. I’m very impressed with him. doing and I encourage you if you haven’t worked with Clay, work with Clay he’s gonna help magnify you and there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does he probably sleeps for maybe six hours a day and literally the rest of time he’s working and he can outwork everybody in the room every single day and and he loves it so anyways this is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness thank you Clay and anybody out there that’s wanting to work with clay It’s a great great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Cola. We’ll see you guys Bye. Bye. Hi, I’m Aaron answers with Shaw homes. I first heard about clay through Mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job. He had been doing for them and and I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes, and then I met Clay, and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15-year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of salespeople for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. We’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four-month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing, and Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town. And so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean the thing is it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us and I know if you give them a shot I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800% increase in our internet leads. Going from 10 a month to 180 a month, that would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick and I am the founder of D. Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay-at-home mom for 12 years and my three kids started school and they were in school full-time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide what do I want to do. My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. My husband suggested real estate. He’s a home builder so real estate and home building go hand in hand and we just rolled with it. I love people, I love working with people, I love the building relationships, but one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things. The processes and the advertising and marketing. I knew that I did not have what I needed to make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time and he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent. Everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage, our real estate brokerage, eight months ago. And in that time, we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week, we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents. But I have to give credit where credit’s due. And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen. I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way. I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean I went to medical school, I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63,000 investment. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. The Thrive Time Show, two-day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13-point business system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days You can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems So now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve You’re gonna leave energized motivated, but you’re also gonna leave empowered The reason why I’ve 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 gonna be the best business workshop ever and we’re gonna 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. Don’t look. We built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. JT, do you know what time it is? 410. It’s T-Bo 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 have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field, and off the field, the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now, the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Well, they’re going to have to come and find out, because I don’t know. I’m just saying, Tim Tebow’s going to teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Folks, I’m telling you, if you want to learn branding, you want to learn marketing, you want to learn search engine optimization, you want to learn social media marketing, that’s what we teach at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive workshop. If you want to learn accounting, you want to learn sales systems, you want to learn how to build a linear workflow, you want to learn how to franchise your business, that is what we teach at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. 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. We’ve had the top PR consultant in the history of the planet has spoken at the Thrive Time Show workshops. We’ve had Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, a company that creates apparel worn by celebrities all throughout the world. Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, has spoken at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshops. We have the guy, we’ve had the man who’s responsible for turning around Harley Davidson, a man by the name of Ken Schmidt. He has spoken at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops. Folks, I’m telling you, these events are going to teach you what you need to know to start and grow a successful business. And the way we price the events, the way we do these events, is you can pay $250 for a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. What? 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 going to see thousands of people just like you who’ve been able to go from just surviving to thriving. Each and every day, we’re going to add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today. Get those tickets today. Go to thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? I don’t know what I do. How does it work? You just go to thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to thrivetimeshow.com. 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 could 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 Yeah, 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 Tulsa, Jerusalem. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Jerusalem, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show in Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. Who? You. You’re going to come. Who? I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at Thrivetimeshow.com. And again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets, which give 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, 35 years. 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies and I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California, in the beautiful, sunny weather of LA, come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it, and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation. Really life-changing, and I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine, I’ll see you in Tulsa. Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops because we teach you what you need to know to grow. You can learn the proven 13-point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and you’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 loan it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Show Business Workshop. Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you’ve got to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And 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. And so Mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend, Eric, 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 is 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. He said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? I said, no. My father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. And I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner, to the investor. And I owe a lot of that to you. And I just wanted to take a moment to tell you, thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. And I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. I just want to tell you, thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, you know, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. You know, more than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. So anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not 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.