Clay Clark | Start Here | From In The Business To On It + Systems: The Skeleton Of Any Successful Business

Audio Transcription

Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s what I’m about. So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them. I see and see up on your radio. And now three, two, one. Here we go. Starting from the bottom. Now we hit it. Starting from the bottom. And that’s what you got to do. All right, Marshall marination moment here. We’re talking about the checklist and the skeleton of your successful business. Obviously, I’m not Marshall. That’s not Marshall either. He’s much taller than both of us. But this is a big point here. We’re talking about working in the business and not on the business. So this section might be the biggest impact to a business owner that simply feels there’s no progress being made in growing the business. They’re working so hard to operating it. Talk about this and the effect that checklists can have here. I want to put up the notable quotable on the screen from Tim Ferriss. I’m going to paraphrase it now because I don’t have it in front of me, but we’ll put it up on the screen. But basically, Tim Ferriss talks about how hard work is a form of laziness. Ooh, that’s deep. Because I mean, if you work really, really hard and you never think about how can I do it more efficiently, it’s a form of mental laziness. So I pride myself on working very hard. That’s my whole thing. I’ll work hard, I’ll work hard, I’ll work hard, I’ll work hard. I’m just working hard.” And my wife is like, she says to me the other night, she goes, �Hey, babe, the real estate company that you’re coaching, do you realize how many listings they have?� And I’m going, �Yeah, I mean, whatever. It’s a lot. Whatever, just, you know, whatever. I’m just like, whatever. You know, just we’re working. I got a lot of stuff going on. Just whatever. Chopping wood. Chopping wood. You know, chopping. Yeah. But she’s going, �So, but seriously though, like, have you thought about that? How much money do they make on average commission per time they sell one? I’m like, I don’t know 2,500 bucks and Jesus like Well Just saying I mean if that’s you know Wouldn’t it make sense for you to have somebody that you knew who just had a license and you just took half the commissions with Them because you’re getting listings all day. Why would you not just not and I’m just going to whatever I’m chopping wood Working in the working in the business working Making money chopping wood with my bare hands. And then eventually, but you stop and you take your time out and you go, wait a minute. So what I’m asking you to do, Thrivers, is just like I had to do this week, and that’s why Sundays are so great because I really do believe, even if you don’t believe in the religious context of it, I really do believe that taking a day off to think about your life and the direction you’re going and what you want to do and how your visions align with your actions, that’s healthy. I sat back and I realized, one, that’s a great point. I realized by taking the same amount of hours that I’m working coaching that client and simply by taking the thought time to coach somebody else up who’s already making cold calls for the company to help them get listings, that could potentially generate enough gross revenue to help my parents with all of their ongoing medical bills without impacting any part of my life. And it’s just simply a decision. And it was just kind of like working on the business. No, because I’m working in it. When you’re in it, your head’s down, you’re working, so I’d imagine, this is the best example I can give you. If you are working in the forest and you’re a lumberjack and you’re just chopping down trees, it’s so important you put your head down, you just chop down trees, swing, you swing, you swing. Now you have chainsaws here, and you’re just going. But somebody has to climb up to the top of the trees and to look and go, are we going the right way? Because eventually if you don’t, you have these weird patterns and you don’t get anywhere. And so it’s like a compass. And so what I would recommend as an action item is every single Thriver would take one hour every day. And I call it meta time, but you’re working above your current reality. And I would encourage you, Lee Cockrell has awesome trainings. The guy used to be the executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts. He’s a Thrive mentor, used to manage 40,000 people. He encourages this. The time management training you did with him, it’s awesome. But you need to take an hour a day to contrast where you are versus where you want to be with a business Okay, and look at the system and ask yourself what happened yesterday. It was a problem and what systems could I install or Improve to make sure they don’t happen again. Okay, and just by doing that you literally will change your life in a profound way, okay? So you do it. What about the people because I think we we talked to a lot of these people right? These are our people. Yeah, they’re working 60 hours a week, 70 hours a week, 80 hours a week. It’s hot. They’re working. That’s right. They’re chopping wood. That’s right. They’re getting after it because if they don’t, they’re in trouble. Yeah, you get used to that momentum, that energy, that sense of like, I’m getting it done. I’m working. Yeah. And it’s like, if you watch basketball games, we watch basketball a lot. I mean, you like basketball. I do too. It’s so easy to criticize the high school player or the college player or the pro player from your couch. Because you’re like, dude, that guy’s a hothead. You can’t get a technical in a championship game, are you an idiot? Well, you don’t understand the kind of intensity it takes to play. So when Draymond Green and LeBron were getting into it, I immediately thought, dude, Draymond’s got to dial it in. He’s going to get himself in trouble and shift the momentum of the whole series. He’s got to dial it in. I wanted the Warriors to win this time, and I was like, dude, you’ve got to… I sat back from my infinite wisdom on my couch. He’s got to dial it in. Well, you don’t understand what it’s like playing against LeBron James. You’re 6’8″, you’re going against a guy who’s massive, and Draymond’s big, but LeBron’s bigger, and they’re just going at it, and then in the heat of the battle, they make an emotional decision, and they get a technical, and now all of a sudden, Draymond’s not playing. Yeah, that’s how business is. You’re going, you’re going and you’ve got to take that hour a day for that timeout to go, timeout, am I headed the right way? And most times, unfortunately we’re not. Yeah. You drift. So just like if you’re driving a boat on a lake, you don’t want to like, you can take your hands off the wheel for a second, but you don’t want to like take your hands off the wheel on the pontoon boat, go make a sandwich, do some grilling, because you’re going to hit the shore soon. So you hit something. So a lot of business owners are so busy, though, we’re just working, and we’re like, Dad, do you want to take the wheel on the boat? No, kids, I’m just grilling this food. Dad, are you sure? No, I just want to grill it. No. Kids, I’m making the perfect medium rare. And then, boom, you hit something. You’ve got to somehow keep your hands on the wheel and course correct. And it’s going to happen every day, every single morning. Just readjust, readjust, or you’re going to end up living in a van down by the river, listening to the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love from 1977. But you’re not going to have an option, though. We have that option. And so that’s what we’re doing. But you wouldn’t even have the option. Let’s give you a preview of what it would be like. OK. Just imagine you’re living in a van. You have an eight-track player. And somehow, this is the only audio you have. You’re near the Arkansas River. I mean, you’re going to end up looking like, you’re going to just, I can’t believe these were music videos. There’s only water in the Arkansas River sometimes. You would know because you have rafted down. You own, just being real Thrivers, Dan’s probably the most consistent, most non-likely guy I know to raft down the river in the middle of the night, but he did it. I don’t know how long it took you to get. It was terrible. Just a brief, because I know drivers want to know these things. Well, yeah, we get emails about it all the time. So bottom line, 60 seconds, story. Okay, so it was middle of November, hanging out with friends. These friends had some kayaks in their garage, and we’re kind of wondering what we should do, and I think it was a Tuesday night. Tuesday night. And we thought, well, we’ve got some kayaks. Yeah. And we know where there’s some water. Well, it seems like I mean, it could be fun. Yeah. Water could be. Let’s do it. No wisdom of reason. Well, we did not stop for that. We did not stop for that. Too busy working in the business. We’re too busy working in the business to realize that kayaking in the Arkansas River that only sometimes has water in November was a bad idea. The business of having fun had to go on. You’re too busy working in it. I was too busy working in it. I had to keep going. That’s right. So we did. And half the time there was water. The other half the time we would have to stand up out of the kayak in water that was like, you know, a couple inches deep. Freezing cold this November. Customers get upset. Customers come, customers go, employees come in, employees go. And all of a sudden you’re just next to you. You know, you’re walking in and out of the river, in and out, in and out. Customers go like that. But you’re carrying the kayak, carrying the kayak. I mean, somebody didn’t show up to work. Somebody didn’t show up to work this week. You had to work all week, you know, getting all the crap done. You’re just nobody there carrying a kayak down the river. Just carry it back down the river. And instead of this like 30 to 45 minute voyage of you know a couple miles, a few miles down the this ends up being a five hour long process. You told your wife to be home by six o’clock pretty soon you came home by six o’clock on Sunday on the wrong day on the wrong day and it is now four in the morning four in the morning we deal I mean you know we worked late we have work in a few hours yeah working in working the business and now we have to drive these kayaks you know back home and go take a shower and get ready for work. Yeah, absolutely. It’s normal. It’s the middle of November and haven’t slept at all. Get pretty sick the next day because, you know, you’re out in the river in the middle of November until late at night. We did do this. This is the real. And this is real quick, though, Thrivers, I know this sounds stupid, this story, but I’m telling you, you were in the business of having fun, and no one thought of extra in it, and that’s what happens in your business. And so us Thrivers, I know, I mean, I just have a business, I’m a LLC, I’ve got this money in the bank, I put my taxes, I’m Margaret, I pay my taxes. And then what happens is you end up in the freaking Arkansas River of the game of business, shivering in November, it’s all good, it’s just horrible, it’s just very busy right now this time of year. So all I’m just saying, Thrivers, is it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, seriously just kayaking because you’re having fun, or you’re running a business because you’re working, either way we get caught in the moment, we don’t take a time out. Now if anybody in that crew would have been like, it’s off. Right. I did not realize. I thought it was July. I thought, what happened? But if no one had that kind of timeout to ask the hard questions was, are we really? Perhaps we could go to a bar. Perhaps we could taxi home. Perhaps we could do a lot of things. But this is probably not the move. Probably not the best move. Thankfully you made it, but you looked like absolute crap the next morning. You looked awful. It was so bad. And you are just now recovering. I just now recovered. This was several years ago. Yeah, he’s had all the facial surgeries he’s had to do to just get back to normal. It’s just bizarre. Last truth bomb here. Last truth bomb to wrap this all up. Wrap it up. On the more serious truth bomb side, if I’m the guy working 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week in my business, and I’ve got, you know, family stuff, and I’ve got other responsibilities, how in the world am I going to carve out this extra time you’re saying that I don’t have? You’re saying take this extra time to plan, to build checklists. Yeah, okay, the big three, I always tell people this, the big three, I tell consulting clients this. One is, in Genesis, it refers to how God created the earth in six days and he rested on the seventh. If you’re reading the great book of Elon Musk, he talks about how you just have to work like hell and work 60 to 80 hours a week. If you’re reading any autobiography of anybody successful, they all work about six days a week. You can get up early, you can stay up late. Do not cut into your family time, but find a way. That’s option one. Option two is say no. There’s a Steve Jobs quote we’ll put up here. Yeah. But people think that Steve Jobs said often, I’m paraphrasing, but he said, people think that focusing is about saying yes. No, in fact, it’s about saying no to just thousands of things. So you’ve got to say no. And the third thing is every single person, you’ve got to know your basic financials. You’ve got to know your break even point. You have to know your profit per customer. And you’ve got to know the numbers of deals you have to hit to hit your financial goals. You also have to know when your taxes are due. And you also have to know your lifetime value of your customers. And if you get lost on that, we’ll put them up on the screen here and we will set up a coaching session. And I will tell you, I’ve literally worked with so many businesses where we increase their profit per customer by like eight bucks, nine bucks, or decrease their expenses, or just little moves. And they literally end up making so much money at the end of the month, as opposed to having, running out of money, and there’s still a lot of month left. Okay, boom, that’s a big deal. It’s huge, just don’t go kayaking down the river, you know, in November, that’s kind of the moral of this. That was really the big point of this training, was to make sure you don’t do that. Don’t do it. Okay, that was the skeletal system of your successful business. Checklists and systems, hope you enjoyed it come back soon drive 15 back up Wow survivors what is that my name is Daniel McKenna sitting across from me is your your your your pale leader mmm yeah Clark yeah I really consider myself in the world of business coaching yeah I would say that I am the leader of the pale division of the business coaching pinnacle that people aspire to be part of. Wow, there’s a lot of alliteration in there. Yeah, I thought of it for several seconds. That was well worth it, that was great. I’m engraving it on my desk right now. While you were talking I was engraving. Today we are talking about what the heck is a system. We’re talking about the skeletons of real successful businesses. True. So we’re going to dive into this and in the book you refer to systems as cyborg-like, so we’ll get a little out of the mystification and into the reality here. And we’re going to start with a notable quotable. Yeah, that’ll sit over here. Is a tool go one day. He’s the bestselling author of the checklist manifesto and a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. If you’re a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, you’ve probably read some books. You’ve probably done some study and it’s hard to compare. You say, you know, did you get kicked out of a private Christian college like I did or Robert University or did you were you a professor at Harvard? I think we all know the choice that we make. I think we know where we stand. Who’s more credible? Okay, a tool says, checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. Well, when you’re building systems, okay, systems are very by step. So a lot of times we over, we hear the word system and we, and we sort of, um, veg out. Um, I’ll give you an example. Um, my brother, he’s going to watch this. He’s gonna be so mad, but it’s true. And just, we, we’ve listened, we’re, we’re working through this thing called life together, except there are differences. Here we go. He really, really thinks through everything. My brother. So he loves like, um, religion’s not simple to him. So my brother actually went to school, he studied religion, he studied some more, he’s getting his doctorate right now. He’d probably be frustrated, I don’t even know what he’s getting right now, but the point is he would be frustrated. The thing is is that I kind of like, he’s going to school and stuff. Yeah. A lot of people hear systems and they go, that’s boring. Let me tell you what systems are. Systems are money machines. So the system is a money machine, okay? It’s a step-by-step way to do it. So right now we’re opening up the elephant in the room number three, the trifecta in Broken Arrow. And what we’re going to do is this is Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. We’re opening up the third location. And I, in the last, the first one I did, I had it in my mind and I wrote it down and it was very specific for me. So I thought, oh my gosh, this system is so detailed. Now the second one, my former assistant, I remember giving it to her and she, very smart, hard worker, she goes, I don’t know what this means. Because see, I put in the little abbreviations. Oh, you know what I mean? So like the BD was back door. Okay. For my front door FD, you had front of house, FOH, back of house, and I had these little things in the system because I was so tricky, I wanted to save myself several words. Several seconds. You know, because I’m working on this big old checklist, I’m thinking, B-O-H. So imagine now you’re my assistant, you’re working diligently, we have a grand opening in 48 hours, and you’re True story, I mean they’re calling going, hey, what’s the bow? And I’m going, what’s the foe? And I’m like, foe show, I don’t know, I mean I don’t know what you’re saying. I mean obviously at first I thought they were kind of screwing with me. And then I put on the playlist, make sure to play up-tempo music that creates a kind of a club-ish atmosphere. And again, it’s like, I don’t know, you want hip-hop, do you want, you know. So I had to define, okay, so I had to make a playlist of the music I wanted. That was, first parts of the system was the checklist. What song do I play first, second, third, fourth. Then the signs. I did it today, Dan. I’m freaking, I’m so mad at myself. Poor Abigail, she just printed up a bunch of signs. And you know what she did? You know those little street signs that say, one dollar haircut, free food, live band, live music. You know what she did? No. She printed off one-sided signs. You know why? Because I didn’t tell her two-sided and there would be no way for her to know because when else would I want something else two-sided? You know what I mean? Yeah. So I have now signs. We have 15 signs on the system that says we need to have eight systems that say $1 haircut front and back. And we have five signs that say live music. And then another group of signs, there’s like, I want to say this is 13, so it’s like, how many more? Like 12 more or whatever that say free food And we have the sign combination actually written down, but even in my infinite wisdom today I discovered that my system still didn’t say print double-sided science And so even though I teach systems I make systems the point is you have to define It’s a four-step process you define what you think is gonna work And then you have to do it. You have to act. Define act. So D-A, define act. After you act, then you have to measure. Okay? So you have to measure. Okay? Then after you measure, you have to refine. So you could say D-A-M-R or you could say, dammer! That’s usually what you end up doing. I’m being serious though in business and I joke about this with my clients all the time, but if you don’t define it, and you don’t act, and you don’t measure, and you don’t refine, you run around going, damn it, damn it, because you’re just so frustrated that it never works, and you just want to communicate. So you’re like, Abigail, why would you just not? That was $400 of signs, don’t you? And then from her perspective, she’s like, you definitely said to order the signs from signs now this size I did that how could I possibly know that you wanted both sides? It’s not common since she’s very smart person, but what happened is I Wasn’t intelligent enough or was it fourth? I wasn’t thinking enough or I guess what I’m not perfect And that’s what I’m trying to communicate Nobody’s perfect. So you do the best you can and you define the systems and day by day. So today, as soon as I saw it happen, I go, so I take out my pen and I write it down and I put it on my to-do list and I will, as God is my witness, I will be fixing that checklist in the morning. And you can never delegate the building of a checklist. Never, do not, as the owner, do not delegate the building of a checklist because somebody will start to use their jargon and their, you’ve got to learn through combined experience. And so you get better and better incrementally. And now I would say when we open up the fourth one, this will be the fourth time that I think it’s perfect, but each time is exponentially better than the previous generation. So that’s really the process of building a system. That’s how you do it. And that’s who Gawande is referring to, is that when you have a checklist, it defends you because Abigail followed the system exactly to what I told her to do, and therefore it’s not her fault. Right? It’s the system’s fault, aka my fault. And if she would have just done it on her own without a checklist, she would have missed major steps, and then we would have blamed her memory, or her, and you start to say it’s common sense, and it gets, people get offended. Please for whatever you can do, just please follow the system. D-A-M-R, okay, define, act, measure, refine. Keep doing it. Think on paper. Write it down. Okay. And that was a great example of you’re doing the process correctly. You’re doing the checklist thing correctly. And there is still something that through communication didn’t get all the way through. How close would you have gotten to even there if it wasn’t a checklist thing? If you just said, okay, I remember how we did it last time. Last time we did, let’s see, we hired a sign guy and then we had a band and I’m pretty sure that we had eight people there Yeah, then what if you did that what if there was no checklist at all well here? You would do what you’d never make any progress And some other things that would happen to kind of weird is like I don’t know currently how many Towels you can put in our washer and dryer. I don’t know for the elephant room I don’t know, but there’s a certain number, and I’m telling you, if you put it more than that in there, I would want to kill you. Because we’ve spent thousands of dollars on washers and dryers this year, well, the last two years. And I don’t talk about it a lot, but if you ever went downstairs at the 16th and Boston office, you’d smell like a, what does that smell like, burned hair or something? Well, what happened literally is that somebody tried to put common sense numbers of towels in there, and I think the max number is like 30. So we had to put a list on there of 30. This is what we did and this is me being stupid. First I said quit putting so many in there Sam what freaks wrong with you? Just put the right amount of towels in. I remember people were like I was just trying to put in the right number. Don’t be a wuss about it. So then you go back next time there’s like four towels in there. And I’m like, dude, if you put in four towels a day, we’re never gonna be done. And in my mind I’m thinking, what an idiot. In his side he’s going, he’s probably going, this guy hates people, and he’s an idiot. And so over time you start to go, and then so finally in the meeting, Abigail, she’s like, how many towels? And at this point you’re so mad, because entrepreneur, remember, you’re working, entrepreneurs, you’re working fast, you’re working against the budget, you’re working to your go-go. I’m like, I don’t freaking know if you freaking need to have a freaking checklist to tell you how many freaking towels to put in the, the, the, the, the, you know what I mean? And she’s just like, what’s the number? I don’t know. And she’s like, let’s count. So we had to freaking count. I’m not kidding, that stuff happens. And then what, now we have a system and now people are like, you know, now it says on there, the big sign, how many you can put in there, how many you can’t. There’s so many stupid, stupid, just, I wanna give fresh examples, cause they’re so true, I’ll give you one more. You spoke with a surgeon, and after you had chopped a woman’s face to give her a facelift? Yeah. Sick. Yeah. What does that look like in your mind? Like while you’re doing it? It doesn’t look pretty. True story. I walked in as a consultant one day and I see a woman’s face peeled back, swear to you. And he’s like, what’s up, man? I was like Freddy Krueger thing. I’m like, oh, so I go in the back to go to the bathroom, because that’s like a place where as a man, if you go to a spa bathroom, it smells good, you can get away, you can kind of like, you kind of get away, and I was like, I’m just going to go in there and just hold myself. So I was kind of like looking for my old, my old, oh, Billy button. Oh, Billy. Because I honestly feel like I’ve seen like something I shouldn’t see. Yeah. And I sit down, and I’m not kidding, I sit down and I look and there’s a bucket full of blood from a previous procedure. And I’m going, oh Billy. I’m just like, hold me, hold me. I mean honestly, I was like, Jack, Jack, gross. I felt gross. I turn and I’m trying to just get it together and I’m walking out and one of the newest people who worked at this place, I don’t want to get myself in trouble, but it was in Texas, but they have a machine that removes moles and one of the newest employees was thinking it was funny to try to remove the mole of another employee without their permission. So it was like, bzz, bzz, bzz. So remember the scene. There’s a doctor having surgery, going, hi! And you just happen to walk by, see them. There’s a bucket of blood, and there’s a guy going, bzzz, bzzz. And then I walk out front, and it’s the husband of the lady having surgery hearing all of that. Oh my gosh. And I’m just going, the whole towel thing wasn’t that bad. The towel thing wasn’t that bad. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, but so anyway, I go into this business afterwards, I said, hey, doctor, I want to let you know some things happened this week. Why, you know, he goes, well, one is having surgery with the door open to this block. There’s buckets of blood in the back. Three. Now, this guy did not go to jail. He helped him. We helped him get it together. He’s doing well now, but I’m just telling you, he’s not a bad person, but he owned multiple locations and there wasn’t a checklist in place. So the staff, the front desk lady, who had no class at all, by the way, just disaster, she was doing what she thought was ethical. The people in the back were just having a good time. The customer was, but the complaints, the complaints that were coming in were over the top. And it was just like, oh gosh. And I will tell you, it’s funny, until one of his colleagues paralyzed a woman’s face for life because he had a nerve while doing a procedure where he wasn’t following a checklist. And this is where I want to tie this in because I’m telling you, if you read the checklist manifesto, we’ll put the stat on the screen here. I don’t want to misquote it, but in the book it shows that John Hopkins University, they did a study of some different hospitals. One of them was John Hopkins, one was University of Michigan, and they show that a startlingly high number of doctors forget to wash the patient’s skin or to read what medicine that they are allergic to before the procedure. He gave the lady a procedure to knock her out during it and it caused her to have a stroke and she’s forever can’t use one side of her body and someone forgot a checklist so yeah the towels luckily I’m in a stupid business like a student my mind is stupid I mean we’re cutting hair so it’s sure it’s kind of stupid like you screw up and I your hair looks weird bro come back in a month yeah yeah but like you could in some industries some of you watch you can kill people. We work in the wedding industry, and I’m telling you, I’m not joking, unfortunately, I’ve been a part of ruining someone’s wedding before as a DJ, but didn’t have the song ready for their first dance. I can tell you, I personally ruined a wedding. Megan, I’m sorry. And so, but I mean, when you’re at the wedding and you’re at the Summit Club and everyone’s looking at you and you’re out there. The Summit Club is a beautiful country club in the sky on top of the Bank of America tower. And when I screwed up that wedding, I did my best, but if I would have used the checklist, that could have… You can do your best, but you can kind of forget it and let the checklist do its part. But I didn’t have one, and so I showed up at her wedding and I didn’t have her first dance song. And to this day, she’s probably still frustrated. I’ll let you let it go, but she’s still frustrated. Well I love that you gave a lot of very specific examples of what you might consider minutiae. You might consider like small things, but these are big things that adjusted the business. So in your business, whatever it is that you do, if you edit videos, if you clean bathrooms, if you need to trade your staff, if you code websites, if you do the haircut thing, if you fly airplanes, you probably need these checklists. Yeah, and I’ll say this, we have a checklist template that’s available for you. All you gotta do is email us at info at thrive15.com also the way to get it. Yep. But we have one that we reverse engineered from, get this, a billion-dollar company. Ooh. Their new hiring checklist. And through my various sources, I want you guys to hear what I’m going to play. Let’s hear some source stuff here. I have worked with the Illuminati to get this information. It is literally the checklist for hiring new people from a billion dollar company. And it could be yours. All you have to do is email us at info at thrive15.com. And I’ll send it to you. This is the kind of stuff that people have secret meetings where they sacrifice goats to get this kind of stuff. For years people have met. I’ve been in a lot of meetings with people who have been in the business for years. And I’ve been in a lot of meetings with people who have been in the business for years. And I’ve been in a lot of meetings with people who have been in the business for years. And I’ve been in a lot of meetings with people who have been in the business for years. And I’ve been in a lot of meetings with people who have been in the business for years people have met and… Hey, what do you have there? It’s a checklist for a billion dollar company. Yeah. That’s what, I’m just telling you, that’s kind of the secret sauce that you’re going to find here. You really can’t find somewhere else. To be safe, don’t share this video. You can share other videos here on Thrive, but just to be safe, because we did mention some, you know, some of that stuff, just… And I’m going to put a picture on the screen right now of the, where we’re broadcasting from for today’s training. It might look the same, but on top of a cliff, there’s a monastery with a long, you might have seen pictures online, but there’s a staircase that wraps around. That’s where Dan and I are right now. Yeah, for safety reasons. For safety, yeah, just because people don’t want us to share the billion dollar, now hiring checklist. We’re coming right back after this training. I’ve got some mind-blowing stats here that you were referring to earlier about checklists and what they’re going to do for your business. Don’t go anywhere. Alright Thrivers, we are back. Episode 2 here. We’re talking about the skeleton of every successful business and we’re talking about checklists. Yeah, let’s get it on. Okay. And we talk about in the book that we cannot stress this enough. The business systems that you create must include every piece of company specific knowledge that you and your company have, this information cannot be trapped within the mind of an individual member of the company. Now we referred to in the previous training, you talked about that study in Checklist Manifesto, you talked about that study with the Michigan hospitals. Yes. They went through and basically how it works, and you know better than I do because you’re with doctors all the time. Yeah. But when you’re cutting somebody open or you are even just like giving them medicine a lot of times you’re sticking foreign objects into their body. You’re sticking needles, you’re cutting, you’re doing all these things. A lot of unsanitary things, right? Like the human body wasn’t necessarily meant to have like things like jabbed inside of it necessarily. And infection happens. Hey, can we real quick, can I play a little music that’ll help kind of make this a little lighter? Yeah, please do. Yeah, please do. Okay, go ahead. Continue. Okay. And infection happens. Infection happens. And this is like killing a lot of people. Like killing, like you go to the hospital because you’re sick or something, and then you end up dying because of infection because someone didn’t follow a checklist. So, in this study, this is in the book Checklist Manifesto, in a study of 100 Michigan hospitals, they implemented very simple checklists. They found that 30% of the time, this is the number you’re referring to, 30% of the time surgical teams skipped one of these five essential steps. Are you ready for these? I’m ready. These brain exploding steps. One was washing their hands. Washing their hands. Two was cleaning the area. Cleaning the area. Three was draping the patient. Draping. We’ll shorten that to draping. We’ll edit that out. Number four was donning a surgical hat so their hairs didn’t fly everywhere. A surgical hat! Five was gloves and gown and then applying a sterile dressing. G-love! G-love! So these are all, these are all very like, I should probably wash my hands, I should probably put on my doctor stuff, I should probably wear a hat, I should probably clean the area. These are all common sense things from like geniuses, right? Like people that have spent their whole life studying this medicine and then you get there and the dude didn’t wash his hands and he’s not wearing a hat. Thirty percent of the time. That’s crazy. So they implemented these checklists to do those things. I want to say something to take the room down. All right. They’re going to bring it back up because it’s been long enough where I can kind of cope with it. Yeah. My grandpa died because I didn’t use a checklist. Really? Yeah, Grandpa Clayton, who I’m named after, he was a military vet and he had two bad knees and he went into the VA hospital and they have things you can put on your legs to keep your blood from clotting. And you’ve probably been in the hospital recently and you’ll see they’re like an intense sock they put on your legs to keep you from having blood clots. And they cost about six bucks and the person who worked on him forgot and he died. Wow. True story. And he was totally healthy before. I saw him and it was supposed to be a routine procedure. I remember talking to him, shaking his hand, hey, we’ll see you. You know, he had bad knees and he went in and died. And they said, we forgot the step. And that’s not like, that’s not like you’re the only one. No, I mean, actually, this is very, very common. This is a third of the time in hospitals. Yeah, they’re forgetting. And my dad was in the hospital, was in the hospital. And a nice nurse lady, I’m sure she has a lot of things going for a great lady. And my dad fell down. Like he, my dad, you understand, like we have ALS, you lose the ability to use various parts of your body. So he can’t support himself anymore. So he got up and he, there’s a, your, your hospital bed is plugged into the wall. There’s a checklist. You’re supposed to plug it into the wall You’re supposed to turn on the IV drip whatever in the middle of the night He needed to get up and someone didn’t turn on his monitor. I couldn’t hear him so he needed to go to the restroom and he was Frail enough where he shouldn’t be walking, but he wanted to believe he could yeah, and he fell and Totally injured himself pretty bad. Yeah, and the lady is like I forgot. Yeah, I mean you forgot I mean, so I mean let’s get the end of the day. Let’s get serious here for a second. What are we trying to do? What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to build a successful company. But what we’re actually doing is we’re screwing up someone’s wedding. We’re killing someone’s dad. We’re killing someone’s grandpa. We’re not making a profit. We’re doing the same mistakes over and over and over. We’re really being somewhere between reckless, I mean, see the word reckless is like, you know, or negligent, it sounds like, oh my gosh, I didn’t intend to be bad, but negligence, I mean, if you had a car accident and they call it vehicular homicide if you kill somebody with a car, there is, you know, where you don’t mean to, but you did. And so I would just argue that anybody here we need to get serious for a second and just realize that without a checklist The sheer volume, you know, and I’m quoting a tool go on to here, but the sheer volume and the complexity of what we know Has really, you know well beyond it It’s it’s exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, you know safely or reliably knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. So I’m going to do trivia questions for you. Here we go. Yeah. With the photography business, what kind of editing software, what particular editing software do we use? We use Photoshop and Lightroom. Okay. And what is your favorite filter for editing? We narrowed it down to three so that they couldn’t choose. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So what are your favorite three? So we have a classic filter, we have a modern filter. I guess we have four. We have a classic filter, modern filter, a black and white filter, and a kind of vintage-y look. When we shoot a video, what kind of file should be exported as? Usually MP4s. Why? It’s a good file size, and they play well back on your computers. Okay. These are things that you know. Yeah. I don’t know these things, but because they’re written down, they’re in a system, so on my side, you know, say, well, what do I know? I mean, I have to know so many specific, like, what is the cell phone for Dr. Zellner? You know, how do I, what is David Robinson’s opinion of our company? You know, who needs to be hired? Who needs to be fired? What is our growth rate? How do we get to the top of Google? How do we, and everyone has to have these knowledge bases, but if they’re not recorded somewhere, so yesterday, today’s Monday, so yesterday was Saturday, so two days ago, my cell phone did the whole thing where it turns black but it’s still on. He knows you’re talking to someone and it’s like, it’s still on but the screen went black? Sure. So I take it into the place and I said, hey, am I eligible for an upgrade? The guy at T-Mobile, he’s a good guy, he says, yeah, you are, it’s great, it’s a Galaxy 7 or something. I said, great, I’ll get a Galaxy 7. So I go to the AT&T, that’s my wife. She has AT&T, I have T-Mobile. And so we go over there and I said, hey, is my wife ready for an upgrade? He goes, absolutely. So I get my wife’s. So my wife’s getting upgraded, I’m getting upgraded. They’re both free because it’s all included in your payment and whatever. And it’s like 4 o’clock, bro. Place is open till 6. I said, hey, how are we doing, man? I’ve been there for like three hours. I haven’t been there. I went to Target and when I come back and I said, hey, where we at? And he goes, you have 19,000 contacts in your phone. And I said, I know, I pretty sure I established that when I brought it in, but he goes, it’ll take you till seven o’clock tomorrow night. I said, it was really, so true story, I left the phone with him all night. And the next day I came back and I think it was four, I think it was, so it’s four o’clock the next day I came back, it’s Sunday, because they’re open till five. And he was like, you still have 400 more contacts. But I had them all backed up to Google, that’s kind of like my fail safe, and I was still able to make some calls and reach some people that I needed to from a different phone number because of that knowledge. But the complexity of my world has exceeded my ability to do what I need to do without a checklist or a database or a system or whatever. The point is, my wife was neutralized as well because hers was in a database. And so, but because we backed them up to Google, we just logged into Gmail, we’re able to find the contacts and make some things happen. I’m asking you thrivers right now, what parts of your business are you just totally, is the complexity of what you do? I mean, reach out to us and email us and ask us to send you the SEO manifesto. Ooh, that’ll be a fun reading. Yeah, Search Engine Optimization Manifesto. Previously, I called it the SEO Bible, but I realized it was sacrilegious and I had to taser myself. But the thing is, is that when you ask for a copy of this, look at all the steps. Yeah. I mean, I helped make the freaking thing, and I do it every day, and I still don’t remember all the steps. Sure. In the order of them. Yeah. I mean, there’s so much stuff. I mean, make sure to declare your alt attributes. Make sure you tell your Google webmaster that you’re going to be, you know, make sure you, I mean, what? Oh, and one more thing, remember that, and it’s just too much. So the world is, now back in the day, you and I, we would have been like farmers, you know, back in like 1800, do you want to be a farmer or you want to be like a blacksmith or a farmer or a blacksmith or a farmer? Snake oil salesman, I think is an option. Yeah, John B. Rockefeller, fun fact, his biological father was a snake whale salesman. There you go. But what you do is you would plant corn. Yeah. Well what are you gonna do now Dan? Well I’ll probably plant some corn and probably you know water it and probably you know harvest it and probably you know it wasn’t that complex. Yeah. Well now we are so smart we’ve created this virtual matrix. Elon Musk actually has been talking about this a little bit but it’s the world’s so complex now that none of us can freaking order a pizza without our smartphone, right? We can’t call our mom without our smartphone. We have no idea what our mom’s phone number is. We’re freaking geniuses. But we can’t, you know what I mean? We’re just helpless. We can’t even change the oil in a car anymore because you’ve got to hook it up to a computer. I wouldn’t even try with my car. Isn’t a car key like $800 or $600? Isn’t that ridiculous? You lose your freaking car key, you can’t even open the door anymore without a battery, you know? So the world is too complex to operate without a checklist and systems. You have to document what you’re doing. And on the other side of all this, because this might sound heavy, it might sound complicated, it might sound like… this sounds like a lot of work. This was a very fun training. This is not a very fun training. I don’t think I want to watch this one again. Can I get the music again? Yeah, let me… by the way, this is Shake It Off. Okay. But it’s sort of a brass band version. It really gets me going and makes me percolate. I dig it. I dig it. Well, on the other side here, let’s say you were man enough or woman enough to go through this process to create the checklist. Going back to that Michigan hospital, the one that had 30% of the time they weren’t following these steps. Yeah. After 15 months of using this simple checklist at this hospital, this checklist saying, hey, wash your hands, hey, clean the stuff, hey, do that. The hospital cut their infection rate from 4% of tip cases to zero. Zero! Saving… Saving? 1,500 lives! 1,500 lives! And nearly $200 million. $200 million! That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of lives. That’s a lot of… See, there you go, you made me feel bad, because I focused on the money. You’re focusing on… Dan’s like, I just love people. I don’t even care about money. I don’t understand. The capitalist pig I work with every day. I just really like people. What I’m saying is, you’ve got to do it for your business. You absolutely do. I’m going to tell you this story real quick, because this ties into this. I thought that my DJ company was Hot Sauce. I’m sitting in the living room. This is in Thanksgiving of 2000, whatever the heck it was. I literally brought my mobile office, which is an AstroVan that I had hand-painted, and I would go out there and I would make calls the entire time on my singular cell phone that had the nine button missing, and I would just dial, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, and I would just book weddings. I’m thinking of the man. I’d come in, I’d come in, and my uncle, yeah, the money phone, my uncle Clint’s like, how you doing, man? I’m going, I just booked a deal. Fallen. And he’s like, it’s Thanksgiving, you know, Eve. It’s like, you know, do you ever think you want to turn the phone off, hang out with family for a while? And I’m like, bro, I just booked two weddings Balin one of which is gonna be the day after tomorrow and my wife’s like You did one like baby. It’s on Friday. I’m the man. I’m booking So anyway, my wife’s I can’t tell you how I can’t describe for you How mad I made her by just being an idiot. She was so mad So I run upstairs and I try to escape and I’m like, she’s gonna kill me. I mean, I thought she was gonna, she’s carving a turkey, but I’m like, she’s gonna throw it at me, throw that knife at me. So I go upstairs and Uncle Clint’s there, and I don’t know Clint is very wealthy or successful. And he goes, so when are you gonna, you know, get serious with the business, grow it? And I’m like, I do six weddings every weekend, four of which I do. Fallen. Friday, Saturday, exactly. I’m like, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I did two last Saturday on the same day. I’ve got another guy who does two events, two systems. You can’t teach people to be funny. You can’t teach people what songs to play. This is an art. And then a sound system to teach somebody to make sound the right way with their mouth. No, and to teach personality. You don’t get a personality like this, Clint. No, you don’t. You were born with it. Freaking genius. So I said something like that. I was so mad at him. So I go downstairs, just pissed. I remember just going to my van, shutting the door. I remember that. I shut, like it was yesterday. I shut the door to my mobile office. I had my freaking Texas A&M sweatshirt on. I just got my hoodie on. I’m just like, is it in my car? Phone rings. Boom, book another one. Come back in. My wife goes, hey, you got to come upstairs and have some wassle. Wassles like what? If you have enough money, you start to, you know, hot cider. No, no. Wassles. Some wassles. I’m like, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do that. Wassils like what if you have enough money you start to you know hot cider no no Wassils and wassils. Yeah, it’s like it’s like half applesauce or something mixed in with that’s weird. It’s weird anyway It’s like you cook it to the point where it Starts to ferment or something okay? My wife goes honey. He built a multi-million dollar water purification company, and I’m going So I wrote upstairs, Clint, what did you say about that? And he starts telling me, well, you got to first make a checklist on how to set up the system. Second, you got to make a checklist on how to take down the system. Third, how to make the announcements. Four, write down all the announcements. Five, and I remember going, that will take forever. And he’s like, how long will it take for you to not teach people and have them just consistently not be able to, you got to make it duplicatable, man. So what songs to play. So I remember deciding, what song is played after Brickhouse? And I’m like, well, I mean, if you’re going to stay in the groove, I mean, typically, like play that funky music kind of fits in there at the same time. He goes, what song would you play after the next one? I go, well, you played Billie Jean, because that’s like a segue into the 80s. He goes, well, what after that? And I go, obviously, it’s Rappers Delight. Obviously. And he’s just like, what’s after that? I was just like, why is this not written down? You do the same thing every event. And so I learned real quick that everything, Thrivers remember this, this is a knowledge bomb, every aspect of your business must be duplicatable, must be duplicable, or must be, every aspect of your business must be duplicable or you’re just building a hobby. I mean, the only exceptions are like if you are a pro, like Michael Jackson, not scalable. Right. You know, LeBron James, not scalable. That’s obvious. They’re like celebrity aliens. But I’m saying if it’s a business, otherwise it’s just a hobby. It’s just you getting weird in your garage with your Gettysburg reenactment little, you know, like you’re, I’m just hand painting this little Gettysburg reenactment. Dad, you don’t make any money with that. Just be quiet, I’m just trying to, this is Civil War, this is right here, this hill is where they fought right here. Dad, come outside, it’s not healthy. Why are you talking like that? Just a sec. You know, that’s a freaking hobby, it’s weird. Yeah, quit watching Game of Thrones and come outside. Okay, so that was some heroic knowledge there on checklists. We’re coming right back with another episode on checklists. We’re gonna talk about why you need them even further, even in your business, even in your business. It’s business time. Coming right back. All right, Thrivers, we are back again. We’re talking about checklists, talking about checklists. That’s what we’re talking about. So we’re talking about the skeleton of your successful business. And you’ve already dove into this a little bit, and I want to get a little capstone thought on this. We’ve talked about surgeons that needed checklists. There’s other several cases that we haven’t talked on about people that fly planes that need checklists. Well, you could call them a pilot. You could call them pilots. I call them the people who fly planes. Which is what I call them as well. It’s crazy how we’ve met at this moment. Pilots seem like an acronym of some sort to me, this shorthand. You’ve talked about DJing. Yeah, which is harder than flying a plane. Which is harder than flying a plane, obviously. So what should I do if I’m the person out there and I say, bah, surgery, flying a plane, DJing, it’s really hard for me to document my system because every customer is different. It’s not turnkey. I’ve got to talk to them about their opinions and every business is different. Do you want to hear me talk some smack? Oh yeah. I enjoy my… Because I got so mad, so mad, so… I was furious. I know it’s hard to believe, but I was furious last week. Yeah. Super mad. And I was talking to a lady, she’s a realtor and she’s kind of an older lady, and she’s just… My business just sucks. It just sucks. I felt bad, but she just sucks. She’s a lady who’s not a thriver, but her friend is. So I’m talking to her and she’s like, you don’t understand. My business is so different. When you call a Fizbo, you can’t just say whatever. You got to have a license, you got to know the market, you’ve got to know about the industry, you’ve got to have a license. You’ve got to. So I did. I helped her in a way that I want to help you. So I’m just give this as an exam. OK, so I said, first off, quit using jargon. So what’s a FISBO? I know what it is, by the way. It’s for sale by owner, but I just want to play the game. I said, what is FISBO? She goes, for sale by owner. You have to know that to make this industry. You’ve got to go get your license. Stop. Look at Pareto. OK, he’s a famous philosopher, Pareto, P-A-R-E-T-O. It’s called the 80-20 rule. The point is you need to spend 80% of your time. What do you need to spend 80% of your time doing to make most of their money? Like what is the thing that you need to do to make 80% of your money? Okay, so the way the Pareto principle works is you’re just 20% of the activities in which you need to spend 80% of your time because it makes the money for you. So she goes, well, if I do listings and I show houses, I go, so what are you spending your time doing? I have to get listings. Okay, stop. So how do you get your listings? Well, I go to networking and I do chamber events. The longer the story goes, the more she sounds like Marilyn Monroe. But she goes, so I go to these networking events and I go to these chamber things and I really, I just, I get to know people because it’s all word of mouth. Yeah, okay, fine. But if, suppose you did have somebody who could call all the people in the world, who are the people who are looking to list their house? Well, people who are getting divorces and whose houses are expired, they’re on the market and they haven’t sold and they’ve already had a listing with a different real estate agent that has expired. I’m like, stop. So if I were to make a script that could call people who have an expired listing, where could I find that? Well, you’d have to have a script. Red X is so hard to use. What’s Red X? It’s the same way we find out this is the system. You go on to Red X, it’s a subscription service you can sign up for that shows you when listings are expiring. And then we built a call script, true story, God is my witness. We built a call script where we call everyone, boop, boop, boop, boop, who has an expired listing and we follow a script. And when we follow the script, we say, how come you decided to use a different, how come you decided not to use a real estate agent? And they say, well, because I wanted to save money. And as you’ll see, every time they ask something different. So I scripted it out, and I said, listen, I called it the guac walk, because of where we’re located. If we can’t set 10 freaking appointments for your real estate company in the first day, that a person who’s never been trained how to do it can do it, you’re going on the guac walk. Meaning when you come to Tulsa, I want you walking on down to Los Cabos to buy me some guac, because I love me some guac. Yeah. And it’s organic, and my wife lets me eat it. So anyway, so and I’m not kidding, rich, and don’t be mad because you ain’t rich, rich Gamby in our office, we’re gonna we’re gonna we’re gonna make this, you make a note, because I want to make this would be a promise. I want the program observer to make sure we do this. I’m going to take a recorded call. We’re just going to change this. You can’t hear the person’s name we’re calling. I’m going to put the recorded calls as downloadables for the Thrivers. And here you will see a man with no real estate experience at all set 11 appointments for the lady. Love it. In one day. And here’s the deal, Thrivers. We have the audio. One of the people that he called goes, so if I decide to work with you guys, will you put it on MLS? Which every realtor knows, that’s the multi-listing system. And this is what Rich’s response was. Because I never trained him, so I’m not laughing at him, I’m laughing at me. Yeah, but he goes, and then the guy goes, so will you put it on MLS? And Rich goes, will you put it on MLS? And he goes, yeah, yeah. I mean, basically. Because he didn’t know what it was. And you can hear the call. It’s so beautiful. And all I’m getting at is, here’s a lady who, in real estate, if you get one listing, the average house in Tulsa sells for about $250,000. And you get 3% of that as a realtor. So she makes $7,500 in Tulsa. She’s in Tulsa, but she’s in there’s different this particular lady the average home price in her market was about three hundred and thirty thousand So we’re talking about nine thousand dollars per commission, and she’s one out of two on Fizbo So she meets you about listing your house one out of two of them. We’re gonna use her yeah Come on build a system But it takes the mindset of believing that what you’re doing is duplicable, and if not it’s just a freaking hobby, okay? Okay, don’t don’t get in don’t die on these stupid hills. I did it, I did it, I freaking did it. I did this stupid thing. I kept saying, I’m the only person who can DJ, because of my vast knowledge of music. My wife’s like, I remember my wife told me one time, she goes, why don’t you teach someone else? I remember going, I will DJ until I am 99 years old, I swear to God, I will do it! And I will, Thrivers, we’ll send you the picture. I got so pissed, I stayed up that night, I took my face, and I put it on the body of like it was Benjamin Franklin. I made it look, have you ever seen that picture? Yeah, yeah. And I gave it to my wife, and I’m like, that’s gonna be me! My last show! Still DJing! Still DJing! I’m the God’s gift to DJ! Thinking I’m so awesome. Yeah. And then when you tweak your leg for the first time, you hurt yourself, and you still got to go DJ? Yeah. That’s not good. No good. You know what I’m saying? When you have no other option? It’s all about options. We talked about it earlier. You said options. Okay. So if I could, you can teach someone to DJ or to get Fizbo listings. You can teach anyone how to do anything. I’m telling you, you can do it. Okay. Well, here is, here’s the guru on Checklist, author of Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande. Oh, preach it. He’s talking about why we don’t do this. Why we don’t do this. The long quote here. Oh, yeah, please. Thank you. He says we don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. Go ahead. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think here the issue is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away, not only from saving lives, but from making money. Oh, make money. It somehow feels beneath us. I believe to use a checklist and embarrassment. All right. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how truly how the truly great among us those we aspire to be handle situations of high stakes and complexity the truly great are daring they improvise oh they do not have protocols and checklists oh they don’t maybe our idea of her Rosa heroism needs updating Oh, he’s updating. Up-dating! Ha! You’re saying, I’m the greatest DJ of all time. I’m the greatest! I don’t need checklists. I’m the GOAT! I’ll tell you what, God created the earth in six days. On the seventh day, he rested. On the eighth day, he made me, because I was a freaking awesome DJ. That’s right. I mean, that’s what I was saying. It’s just so stupid looking back at it. But at the time, you’re just an entrepreneur. You’re so fired up about your thing and you just got your first drop the mic show where people cheered for you. Man, I remember going to Five Oaks Lodge, I remember Nicole, man, Nicole, I thought she hated, Nicole, are we good? Anyway. No, she hates you. Yeah, I know. So, but Nicole, Nicole, I remember she was just not, no, no positive. No, no. Miss Tarp, no positive. Yeah. Where you at now, Miss Tarp? So, no positive. But the first time they said, hey, that was a pretty good show tonight. That’s when I started realizing, people are going to pay me for this. Crazy. I was at the next stage. I validated my idea. But now it’s like, no one’s going to take that away from me. Nope, because I am awesome. I’m going to DJ every show. Every show is going to be perfect. Because we remember how hard it was to do it right, but we forget that now the systems are the guardrails that will protect new DJs. But before we didn’t have those systems, which is why we did such crazy things. Every entrepreneur, we go through this. If you’re not going through this stage, you’re not really starting a business. I mean, if you’re not going through this, you have to go through this and hopefully the benefit, not the hopefully, I know for sure, the benefit, we hear Thrivers tell us all the time, they go, the benefit of Thrive15.com is that I can learn from mentors or mistakes and this right here is an example, we have one Thriver who said, he goes, you know, I mean this because as a result of hearing so many stupid things that you’ve done, I have been able to avoid them. I mean that was not really positive, I could have said it differently, but you know, seriously, this is, we want to help you. Okay yeah so a tool saying that there’s something deeper in there that we feel like we’re the only ones that can do it we feel like we’re dumb if we have to use checklists. Give us the example I know one of the clients you work with they’re out of state I believe they have some sort of bakery of some sort. Yeah. That they’ve they’re growing they’re growing and then all of a sudden they’re they’re not growing because the the owners are back there making the cookies again. Well, here’s what’s going on with this guy. He’s a good guy, and if you’re watching, guy, I’m sorry, I won’t get into any details. But all I can say is that he is unwilling to put in checklists. So think about this. Just think about the complexity. I’ve watched him do this. He goes, now, Dan, to make our patented cookie, our supernova cookie, our cookie that’s just mind-blowing, planet-rocking, galaxy-changing cookies. And the person, by the way, he is pumped about cookies. Sure. He’s like, all you need to remember, Dan, is three things. One is you want to make sure you put in enough of this, enough of that, and enough of this. Got it, Dan? Got it. OK. Now, I’m going to be gone, because I’m going to be delivering some cookies. Make sure you play the music people love. They love, they love. It’s on a XM. You want to turn the channel to channel boom bing bing bing and the three things remember that yeah hey look at the password for the voicemail is four seven three eight left pound but you you got to hit pound and you got it and it’s gonna actually confirm hit star okay and the three things and and they keep doing that all day so the employees are eventually like what the freak are you saying to me? Right? Right. But he’s been doing it forever, and so he becomes annoyed. So he becomes unable to coach other people. Okay. And I am telling you this, if you want to thrive, if you want to see an example of what not to do, you come and watch me on a Monday morning, try to explain to somebody certain things. just because like I operate really well now with people that communicate at a certain high level because I finally have amassed enough knowledge to communicate at their level. I’m sure for a long time they were like, what an idiot. But now, anytime I don’t have a checklist in place, I find myself being like, just do it. You just, and then I’m mad at myself that I haven’t taken the time to invest to build the checklists and the systems. And I’m just telling you, as this business grew for this guy, his orders online have been soaring. It’s crazy. Sales are coming in. He’s processing more. The busier he gets, the more frustrated he is. He’s like, how many times have I told you? You just hit pound five, seven, three, two, four, two, one. Still walking out of the room. Seven, three, four, two, one. You know? And then it’s like, you know, where do I place the orders? I might it’s forward slash just WP dash admin. You got a lot, you know, and it’s just like, you know, I’m fine. I’m fine. You know, and that just becomes and that’s unfortunately what happens because you just when the deals start coming in and you’re not ready to scale, if you don’t nail it and you scale it, you. That’s it. Yeah, that’s what we were going for, yeah. Yeah, if you don’t nail it before you scale it, you fail it, and that sucks. Yeah. You just gotta nail it before you scale it, otherwise you fail it. Bad deal. Okay, so in an effort to not fail it, that right there, folks, was the skeleton of any successful business. We’re talking about checklists, and that’s what’s gonna keep you either potentially actually saving lives or at least making a lot more money. I was thinking about this idea before we move on here, but just kind of final thought. If I were to carry out this idea that you want to nail it before you scale it, because recently my wife’s been telling me I’ve been doing a good job. This is how polygamy starts. You start to go, I’m getting so good at this. I work with this lady. I worked over here. And then that’s why that’s don’t do I just said. Travis, this is a business advice we’re talking about. You don’t I mean, don’t do I. So I’m just I’m just thinking out loud of all that. I’m just trying to figure out my little thing as we’ve been talking. I was just trying to think about where did polygamy start? And I now have discovered it. I’m so glad we had this training. I’m so glad. And on the back end here, we have one more Marshall marination moment working in the business as opposed to on the business. Don’t go anywhere. JT, do you know what time it is? 4.10. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Russia, baby. Tim TiVo is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. 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, but I’ve never had the two-time Heisman Award winning Tim Tebow come present. And a lot of people have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field. And off the field, the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now, the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Well, they’re going to have to come and find out, because I don’t know. Well, I’m just saying, Tim Tebow is going to teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Also, this is the first Thrive Time Show event that we’ve had, where we’re going to have a man who has built a $100 million net worth. Wow. Now, we’ve had a couple of presenters that have had a billion dollar net worth in some real estate sort of things. But this is the first time we’ve had a guy who’s built a service business, and he’s built over $100 million net worth in the service business. It’s the yacht driving, multi-state living guru of franchising. Peter Taunton will be in the house this is the founder of snap fitness the guy behind nine round boxing he’s going to be here in Tulsa, Russel Oklahoma June 27th and 28th. JT why should everybody want to hear what Peter Taunton has to say? Oh because he’s incredible he’s just a fountain of knowledge he is awesome he’s inspired me listening to him talk and not only that he also has he practices what he teaches so he’s a real teacher. He’s not a fake teacher like business school teachers. So you got to come learn from him. Also let me tell you this folks, I don’t want to get this wrong because if I get it wrong, someone’s going to say, you screwed that up buddy. So Michael Levine, this is Michael Levine. He’s going to be coming. He said, who’s Michael Levine? I don’t get this wrong. This is the PR consultant of choice for Michael Jackson, Prince, for Nike, for Charlton Heston, for Nancy Kerrigan, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times best-selling authors he’s represented including pretty much everybody you know who’s been a super celebrity. This is Michael Levine, a good friend of mine. He’s going to come and talk to you about personal branding and the mindset needed to be super successful. The lineup will continue to grow. We have hit Christian reporting artist Colton Dixon in the house. Now people say, Colton Dixon’s in the house? Yes! Colton Dixon’s in the house. So if you like top 40 Christian music, Colton Dixon’s going to be in the house performing. The lineup will continue to grow 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 can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that, did not get inheritance from parents, 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 when’s it going to be? June 27th and 28th. 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, Russell Oklahoma. It’s Tulsa, Russell. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russell, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show and Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. So when? June 27th to 28th. Who? You. You’re going to come. Who? You. I’m talking to you. You can just get your tickets right now at Thrivetimeshow.com. And again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets, which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things. And those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine, and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies. And I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California in the beautiful sunny weather of LA come to Tulsa because last year I did it and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation, really life changing and I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine, I’ll see you in Tulsa. James did I tell you my good friend John Lee Dumas is also joining us at the in-person two day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. That Tim Tebow and that Michael Levine. Have I told you this? You have not told me that. He’s coming all the way from Puerto Rico. This is John Lee Dumas, the host of the chart-topping EOFire.com podcast. He’s absolutely a living legend. This guy started a podcast after wrapping up his service in the United States military and he started recording this podcast daily in his home to the point where he started interviewing big-time folks like Gary Vaynerchuk Like Tony Robbins, and he just kept interviewing bigger and bigger names putting out shows day after day And now he is the legendary host of the EO fire podcast and he’s traveled all the way from Pluto Rico to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the in-person June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show 2-Day Interactive Business Workshop. If you’re out there today, folks, you’ve ever wanted to grow a podcast, a broadcast, you want to get, you want to improve your marketing, if you’ve ever wanted to improve your marketing, your branding, if you’ve ever wanted to increase your sales, you want to come to the 2-Day Interactive June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop featuring Tim Tebow, Michael Levine, John Lee Dumas, and countless big-time super successful entrepreneurs. It’s going to be life-changing. Get your tickets right now at Thrivetimeshow.com. James, what website is that? Thrivetimeshow.com. James, one more time for the 40th anniversary. Thrivetimeshow.com. We own it, and I’m not to be played with because it could get dangerous. See, these people I ride with this moment. We own it. Thrivetime 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. Because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars. 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. I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying. And I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses? Or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever. And we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day, interactive, Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money. So if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person two-day interactive business workshop, all you got to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy in Kings Point, New York, acta non verba. non-verbal. 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 I have a special guest today. Definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done this show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts. And so Mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend, Eric, Eric Trump, but we’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man and there’s so many ways we could take this thing. But I thought, since you and Eric are close, Trump, what were you saying about what Trump can’t, what Donald, who’s my age, and I can say or cannot say? Well, I have to, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorn, who was my boss at the time, I was 19 years old, working at Faith Highway, I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV, and he said, have you read this book, Rich Dad Poor Dad? And I said no. And my father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books, and I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner to the investor, and I owe a lot of that to you. And I just 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, 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. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not a thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, at King’s Point in New York. Acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Whoa. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business. And I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years so what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school and I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us and getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place to the having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards. It’s pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Once I saw what they were doing, I knew I had to get here at the conference. This is probably the best conference or seminar I’ve ever been to in over 30 years of business. You’re not bored. You’re awake and alive the whole time. It’s not pushy. They don’t try to sell you a bunch of things. I was looking to learn how to just get control of my life, my schedule, and just get control of business. Planning your time, breaking it all down, making time for the F6 in your life, and just really implementing it and sticking with the program. It’s really lively. He’s pretty friendly, helpful, and very welcoming. I attended a conference a couple months back and it was really the best business conference I’ve ever attended. At the workshop I learned a lot about time management, really prioritizing what’s the most important. The biggest takeaways are you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business, whether it’s marketing, what are those three marketing tools that you want to use, to human resources. Some of the most successful people and successful businesses in this town, their owners were here today because they wanted to know more from Clay and I found that to be kind of fascinating. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned is diligence. That businesses don’t change overnight. It takes time and effort and you’ve got to go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you want to go. He actually gives you the road map out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do and he gave me the road map out step by step. We’ve set up systems in the business that make my life much easier, allow me some time freedom. Here you can ask any question you want, they guarantee it will be answered. This conference motivates me and also gives me a lot of knowledge and tools. It’s up to you to do this, everybody can do these things, there’s stuff that everybody knows, but if you don’t do it, nobody else is going to do it for you. I can see the marketing working, and it’s just an approach that makes sense. Probably the most notable thing is just the income increase that we’ve had. Everyone’s super fun and super motivating. I’ve been here before, but I’m back again because it motivates me. Your competition’s going to come eventually or try to pick up these tactics, so you better, if you don’t, somebody else will. I’m Rachel with Tip Top Keynight, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey, guys. I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. Right. This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old team and by team I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen. And I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past, and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month, and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship, and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you times a thousand. So we really just want to thank you, Clay, and thank you, Vanessa, for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. If you decide to not attend the Thrive Time Workshop, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. The atmosphere at Clay’s office is very lively. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door. And it really got me and my team very excited. If you decide not to come, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your business, bottom line. Love the environment. I love the way that Clay presents and teaches. It’s a way that not only allows me to comprehend what’s going on, but he explains it in a way to where it just makes sense. The SEO optimization, branding, marketing, I’ve learned more in the last two days than I have the entire four years of college. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned, marketing is key, marketing is everything. Making sure that you’re branded accurately and clearly. How to grow a business using Google reviews and then just how to optimize our name through our website also. Helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high in Google. The biggest thing I needed to learn was how to build my foundation, how to systemize everything and optimize everything, build my SEO. How to become more organized, more efficient. How to make sure the business is really there to serve me, as opposed to me constantly being there for the business. New ways of advertising my business, as well as recruiting new employees. Group interviews, number one. Before we felt like we were held hostage by our employees. Group interviews has completely eliminated that because you’re able to really find the people that would really be the best fit. Hands-on how to hire people, how to deal with human resources, a lot about marketing and overall just how to structure the business, how it works for me and also then how that can translate into working better for my clients. The most valuable thing I’ve learned here is time management. I like the one hour of doing your business is real critical if I’m going to grow and change. Play really teaches you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find your purpose in your business and find the purposes for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. Everybody. Everybody. Everyone. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real.