In this transcript, business coach Clay Clark (U.S. Chamber National Blue Ribbon Quality Award Winner) and Caleb Taylor (Thrive correspondent) discuss the importance of managing your team to succeed on Thrive15.com, the business coach and sales training program.
In this transcript, business coach Clay Clark (U.S. Chamber National Blue Ribbon Quality Award Winner) and Caleb Taylor (Thrive correspondent) discuss the importance of managing your team to succeed on Thrive15.com, the business coach and sales training program.Caleb: How did you apply this principle to your business coach DJ Connection business? It became one of the largest privately-owned entertainment businesses, how did you do that?
Clay: I specifically scheduled a time for sales, service, customer service, accounting, and marketing, and I put it on the schedule.
Caleb: All of them?
Clay: All of them except meetings. Right now for business coach platform Thrive, just an example, if you want to come here and hang out with us, by the way, on Thrive, we offer free high fives. You can fly to Tulsa at any point, come sit in a meeting if you want, free high five, you can come here, it’s cool. We’ll let you do that till there’s about a million of you and then we’ll have to. Here’s the thing is that we have our set meeting. Every single Monday, I have a business coach PR meeting at the same time. PR meeting 11:00 on Monday, I’m on the phone 11:00am, boom.
Caleb: No matter what?
Clay: No matter what, I’m on the phone 11:00am Monday.
Caleb: You can’t make it up as you go. You can’t, “I got behind in this, this.” Do two hours next week.
Clay: It happens. Accounting, I have a meeting with my Accounting team on Tuesday to make sure I approve everyone’s business coach paychecks. I have a newsletter that goes out at Tuesday the same time every Tuesday. On Thursday, I have our sales production meeting, it’s the same time every Thursday from 1:00 to 3:00. Friday, I have a creative meeting at 10:00am, it’s the same every week, and that’s why it’s successful. We also have sales training for success on Thrive15.com.
Caleb: How did you keep track of what each employee needed to learn or what they were learning? Did you have a checklist for each employee?
Clay: What you want to do is you want to have a book like this, like a binder, and every employee needs to have a binder. In the binder, you would write the different areas that they need to know, and you would give them a grade on A, B, and C. You have all the areas they need to learn and you have their grade and the date. You’d write, “June 5th, C, sales. June 5th, B, marketing.” Over time you keep grading them until they get proficient.
Caleb: I feel like for business owners so often there’s those little problems that you’re always having, you call them little fires, you got to put out all the time.
Clay: Amen.
Caleb: A lot of times, it’s inevitable but oftentimes there’s simple things like, “My employees don’t know where the passwords are.” Why is that happening?
Clay: It’s happening because as a general rule, as a human, we prefer … I’m going to write this on the board because this is a little crazy.
Caleb: Do it. You love that board.
Clay: I do, it’s a beautiful thing. Here’s the thing, as a human, most of us, we prefer chaos over predictable success. We prefer chaos over predictable success. Why? Make it nicer. We prefer chaos over predictable success. Why? Because we would rather do anything than to be bored. What happens is we would hate to have the same meeting every Tuesday because that’s predictable, right? The people I know who went to medical school, who graduated with top honors-
Caleb: Yeah.
Clay: They had the same schedule every week where they would study. They’re people of routine. Every entrepreneur I’ve ever read about … Let’s look at this for a second here, if you look on this wall here, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, down here George Lucas, Russell Simmons, James Brown, they were all creatures of habit.
Caleb: Yeah.
Clay: They all had habits. James Brown, musician, he’s the first one to really move on the stage. He could really energize the crowd. He did the stuff, the foot shuffle, that gave Michael Jackson that. Michael Jackson improved upon where James Brown took it. James Brown was the “godfather of soul music,” but he was the hardest working man. He had a set schedule for his band, and they would practice and practice and practice. If you look up his life story, or you watched it one of these television shows about the life of James Brown, you’ll discover a man who practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced. Michael Jordan, you’ll watch a video about a guy who practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced.
Caleb: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Clay: Business coach Steve Jobs, practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced. Was it random? No, it was a set time.
Caleb: Right.
Clay: So that’s something we have to do. We have to fight the desire to have predictable chaos.
Caleb: To help you guys out, we made a list of the meetings that we have every week, that you have every week. We got the sales meeting.
Clay: Sales meeting.
Caleb: You got the accounting meeting.
Clay: Accounting.
Caleb: Leadership meeting.
Clay: Boom.
Caleb: Products, service quality control meeting, new employee training, every week this happen, every week, sales training, leadership training, product service, quality control training. What are some of the meetings that you used to host DJ Connections, were those the same ones essentially? Do they change with Thrive?
Clay: When you’re in a small business, you want to take these multiple meetings and combine them into meetings.
Caleb: Okay.
Clay: You might have a meeting just on marketing and sales.
Caleb: Okay.
Clay: Because you don’t have enough revenue and enough people to have somebody who specializes in just social media.
Caleb: Yeah, got you.
Clay: So social media and sales, and marketing will all have to be at the same time.