E-Myth | Interview With the Best-Selling Author of the E-Myth, Michael Gerber + How to Create a Time & Financial Freedom Producing Business When Being Self-Employed Never Allows Your Responsibilities to Take a Day Off

Audio Transcription

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So many different times in my life, I’ve played with broken or hurt things, broken foot, broken leg, broken hand, broken arm, broken sternum, broken collarbone. I could keep going if I just thought more about bones. Why, man?

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Because I loved it. I loved playing the game. I was passionate about it. One of the reasons I even get encouraged at seeing all of you here, you know

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why I get encouraged by that is because you could be anywhere doing a lot of different things, but you chose to be here

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Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show But this show does in a world filled with endless opportunities Why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses? five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use. Because they believe in you and they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom, now they’re here.

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It’s the Thrive Time Show starring the former US Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body. Dr. Robert Zunich. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women.

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Thirteen multi-million dollar businesses.

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We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and I’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here

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We took flight, started from the bottom Now we’re at the top, teaching you the systems To get what we got, Colton Dixon’s on the hoops I break down the books, she’s bringing some wisdom And the good looks, as the father of five That’s why I’m alive, so if you see my wife and kids

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Please tell them hi, it’s the CNC up on your radio And now, 3, 2, 1, here we go!

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We started from the bottom, now we’re here Started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here.

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We started from the bottom, now we’re here.

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OK, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we’re joined by Matt Klein, the franchise brand developer with a company called Oxifresh, O-X-I-Fresh.com. They have over 500 locations. Matt Klein was not born yesterday. He’s been with the brand for a long time, and he’s here to talk about it. Matt Klein, welcome onto the Thrived Time Show.

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How are you, sir?

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I’m doing awesome.

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How about you?

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Matt, I’m excited to talk to you because I want to make today’s interview very concise for everybody out there. It’s kind of like, you know, if you’re looking right now online, you’re thinking in your mind, there’s a fork in the road, should you start your own company? I’m hoping that today’s show will provide you with clarity in two areas.

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One, is it a good time for you to start a company? Two, is an OxiFresh the best opportunity for you? So first question here, Matt, is being self-employed has, in my opinion, many, many drawbacks. One of which is that you, your responsibility never takes a day off.

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Okay, so there’s positive wins, there’s trade-ups or trade-offs of being self-employed that are both good and bad. So let’s focus on the trade-off. One is your responsibility never takes a day off. Let’s talk about that. With Oxifresh, you own multiple locations yourself.

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What does that mean in your world in terms of where your responsibility of running or owning the Oxifresh never stops. I talk about this a lot because, you know, people really get, when I talk about ownership styles, they really get this thing confused. When I tell people they can run this business

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semi-absentee, that doesn’t mean it’s easier. It also doesn’t mean that they get to neglect their responsibilities. It means they have to be a heck of a lot more attentive to them because they’re not physically there. They’re running it from afar.

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It’s like, what you’re saying is absolutely right. Every time you put your business on the back burner you have potentially open up new areas of problems or missed tasks or you know oversight from your employees or you know whatever it is. And I can personally tell you every time I’ve had like life events I just went through one even now moving into new house doing these things like I had to come back to

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the fold talk to my employees get them re kind of engaged right it’s like anytime you assume that people that work for you are doing exactly what you want you are wrong right you always have to have your foot on the pedal whether it’s with employee expectations whether it’s marketing understanding how you are viewed by your customers in the market on Google all these sorts of things I would tell you if you run a small business you can never ever take your

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foot off the pedal you always have to be driving your business, always.

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Now, Matt, as an example, I’m not trying to one-up you, but as an example, yesterday was a Sunday. My beautiful wife and I, we were doing Sunday kind of things. And I get a call, and I’ll be kind of vague about this, but one of our employees says, hey, boss, we’ve got a little bit of a coup going on.

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I said, what do you mean a coup? Tell me about the coup. And they go, well, we have a competitor that just offered all of our employees a large signing bonus to just leave their business and to go work for them doing the same thing somewhere else. And we’ve got, I think it goes about seven employees deep,

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maybe eight employees deep. And I thought you should know about it. And I go, I got this text at like 10 in the morning on Sunday. Now, church starts at 10. So the pastor says, everybody, I’m so glad you’re here. If you want to stand to your feet and you want to sing praise and worship, and the whole

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time I’m thinking, I’m going to have to go out to my van and call 45 people. So then he’s like, okay, now guys, the pastor from the pulpit is saying, how many of you have ever really thought about Socrates and his monotheistic views and if they parallel that of Jesus. And I’m thinking to myself, I got to call these 47 people in my van. And then Mattie begins to talk about, did you know that Socrates was in Athens and Paul was in Athens? I’m thinking to myself,

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do you know I have to call these 47 people? And Matt, throughout the whole sermon, no matter what the pastor talked about, I kept thinking he was asking me rhetorically, how many of you need to go call those 47 people? I kept feeling like that was the call to action. So we get in the van after church, my kid said, Dad, what do you think about church? I was thinking, I said, I think I need to call 47 people.

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That’s how many people are on payroll and talk to them about this. So I get back to my house pre noon, call employee number one. Hey, did one of our former employees call you and offer you a signing bonus to go work for our competitor. And they go, oh yeah, Mike, okay, that’s good, good. What else did you hear?

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Well, they also told me X, Y, Z, one, two, three about you. And I knew it wasn’t true because I’ve worked with you for almost 10 years, but I don’t think other people know. I said, what happened now? They go, oh yeah, this guy said that he was leaving

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your company because of a moral reason. So not only was it the money, but because of your personal life choices, he decided to go somewhere else. I’m like, that’s, anything else? They go, well, I mean, I go, do you,

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you don’t believe it though? They go, no, I don’t believe it at all. I said, I go, do they believe? They go, oh yeah, they all believe it. I’m going, okay, that’s good. So now, man, I got to call 46 more people.

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I’m not exaggerating. Yesterday cost me, total number on my clipboard here, $54,000 of retention bonuses yesterday to keep those people. Yesterday, $54,000, yesterday, that was a Sunday. That was how I spent my Sunday. And I say this to you folks because I own multiple companies and that sort of a situation

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I believe happens once a month ish. However, the benefit, the trade-off of being self-employed is you can have financial freedom and most of the time you have time freedom. And I believe it’s worth the trade-off. I personally believe that it’s worth the trade-off

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and I’ve been self-employed since I was 15. So I personally like the trade-off. You know, so my wife, Matt, she’s in Oklahoma City, she said, honey, do you want to go to the cheer tournament? I said, no, I’ll pay for it, have a blasty blast, do the thing, I’ll talk to you when you get back.

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And it was my little secret, I’m going to deal with these 47 things, 47 people. So Matt, I just want to talk about the upside of being self-employed for a second, because there’s so much upside, too. I mean, there’s so much upside. There’s so many reasons. I mean, you get to sit the better seats at the NBA game. You get to go on the trips people

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dream of. You get to have a house with a little more square footage. You know, you might get a chance to put your kids in a better school. There’s a lot of benefit to being self-employed, but there’s also a lot of responsibility. Can you talk about the benefits of being self-employed?

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Yeah, I mean, you know, I’m perfect. I have, you know, I technically have a job, right? But like I’ve been doing this for almost 12 years and I get to make my own schedule. So I kind of see my job as my self-employment plus my businesses I have, which are self-employment. Like I have a very unique situation. But if you can run a successful company, you have all the benefits of starting your day when you want, right? Now most people think you start later than you would. It’s not. You start earlier than you would for things

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that you actually want to do. It’s hard to get out of bed if you’re going to do something you’re not excited about. It’s easy to get out of bed if every waking minute that you’re working goes directly back into your pocket and your family’s, right? So the benefit is that I know for a fact, like my wife and I just bought a new house, right?

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And she’s like, this is really, it’s expensive. And I go, it doesn’t matter, I can just work harder. You know? Like if you have a nine to five job, you’re like, oh man, we gotta budget, we gotta save, we gotta do all these things.

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It’s like, no, no, no, I don’t. I can do whatever I want because I can work harder I know how or money with the time that I have in a day now But all there’s a like people don’t realize how how important is for owners of companies to provide Environments for people that can be successful, right? It’s not all about the money if you can actually do something like for instance

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I have employees I Spent an hour with one of my employees the other day because he was having rental disputes with his rent people. He maybe doesn’t have the ability to solve problems as a young man yet, so I get to help him and mentor him on how to become a better person, make better decisions. Those things maybe are annoying in the time you’re doing it, but over a long period of time that builds relationships, it builds families, like outside your immediate family.

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That guy’s been really a part of my team for a long time because he knows I’m not just trying to use him for hay.

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Now Matt, I want to add this real quick. I want to pile on what you just said here and then I want to go to Meg who has a question for you. All the employees yesterday that I talked to, the ones that were like, hell no, I’m not leaving you, I’m all in,

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just so you know, woo woo, sound the alarm. That was the vast majority. That was the vast majority.

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But that could happen overnight, right? You built that environment through relationships,

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through the trust factor of being

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able to help them with things. Maybe they weren’t exactly talking to the business. Maybe family matters. Like, those things are added benefits that you will never get as an employee of a company.

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And that’s the thing. And that’s the reason why these employees chose to stick around. But the brand new ones, the ones who had just started with us, I had to do all sorts of retention bonuses and things. And I mention this because, Matt,

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the benefit of being self-employed, obviously, is the earning. The drawback is I have had to take years to build the relationship with those 47 employees and there’s only one of me. I’ve got five kids. That responsibility of building relationships with all your staff, I’m just telling you,

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folks. Then again, I have managers. I believe in what I call the Jesus principle where you should have one leader per 12 employees. That’s sort of the rough average there. You know, Jesus, there’s one Jesus, 12 apostles. I believe you should have one leader for every 12 employees is kind of the max because it

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gets a little crazy after that. And so yesterday I was figuring out, okay, what employees were loyal to what managers and which employees weren’t. And you learn a lot from during those times. Now Meg, what question would you have for Matt Klein on the line about the benefits or trade-offs of being self-employed.

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Matt, my question would just be as far as time freedom goes and freedom with your family, would you say that for somebody who’s trying to get into being an entrepreneur, owning a business, that a franchise would be a safer option and would get them to that time freedom

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goal faster?

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Yeah, yeah, I think it’s safer because if you think about running your own company from scratch, you have to build a website, you have to get your logo, you got to find all your vendors which aren’t going to be the vendors that you’re not being with because you’re going to have to go through some trial and error. You got a set of infrastructure, if you’re selling a product you got to figure out what product that is. You’re not going to nail it on your first try. If you’re doing a

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service you’re certainly not going to nail that on your first try, right? Like you’re going to have to spend probably six months to a year yourself like trying whatever product or service that you’re doing to see if your customers actually like it before you can ever scale it, right? Like with a franchise, you go into ours for instance, 20 years of fully developed cleaning system,

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from day one you have something that we’ve built that has no problems with the cleaning system, we have an entire software package you get from day one that’s been built for 15 years, you have a brand awareness that’s been around for 20 years, you have a team that would go,

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you could never probably ask our team, not never, but very rarely could you ask our team something that would blow them away and they wouldn’t have an answer to. So we put you, if the race is this long, we put you at the finish line, right? I mean, you still gotta do things, you gotta run your business, and you’re still responsible. Like you don’t work for OxyPress, you run your own OxyPress company, but absolutely,

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I mean, you know, in some respects, to answer your question, if you’ve never run a company before and you start a franchise, I don’t know if you actually understand what you’re getting sometimes. Because if you run another company on your own, you try to do all those things, you’ll have a great respect for what you’re actually getting into.

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So answer your question is yes, you get a lot of it.

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Now Matt, I’m gonna pull up your website here real quick. There’s oxyfresh.com, we’ve got time for five more minutes here with you, but it’s oxyfresh.com, O-X-I, fresh.com. You know, again, you talk about the trade-offs, the pros and cons of being self-employed. To me, a very powerful pro of being self-employed is you get to theoretically have time freedom.

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Now, with the Oxifresh model, you have a call center or a scheduling center that handles all of the customer interactions on the booking and the scheduling, so that frees up huge amounts of time. So, you as a new Oxifresh franchise owner, you don’t have to go hire a call center, you don’t have to staff a call center, you don’t have to build a call center team, you don’t have to motivate the team, you don’t have to supply office space for the team.

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You provide turnkey marketing, turnkey marketing systems, turnkey print pieces, turnkey advertisement strategies. There’s so much you provide. You teach people how to be successful. The whole brand is available for what? How much money total, Matt, to buy an Oxifresh at this point? 47,000 up front for equipment, products, territory

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and training. Plus you want access to about 25k for operating capital. So Meg, final question here, what final question would you have for Matt Klein? There’s somebody watching today’s show, they’re thinking about buying an Oxifresh franchise or at least scheduling a free consultation by going to Oxifresh.com. What question would you have for Matt Klein? The

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question would be, is there any state that you can’t open an Oxifresh in or does it matter where you’re at? If you

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want to do it you can do it? Well technically we’re open in the entire country. You couldn’t open a franchise in Colorado because we’re sold out. So we yeah we were registered in every state. Awesome, thank you Matt. So again folks if you want to learn more about this you go to Oxifresh.com and if you want to learn more about just being self-employed and is it worth it on part two of today’s show we are interviewing Michael Gerber.

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This is the best-selling author of a book. Many of you know this book is called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. The purpose of this book is to really say, is it possible to go from owning a job to owning a business that creates time, freedom, and financial freedom? I would say yes, and Michael Gerber does a great job teaching you how to do that. However, I don’t want to mislead anybody.

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When you own a business, you’re going to have the Sunday coup. It’s going to happen. You’re going to have a thing where you’re trying to buy a house and your employees do weird stuff. Final question for you, Matt Klein. A lot of entrepreneurs, they say, I just went over that yesterday.

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It feels like every day you have to go over the same thing. And I read this self-help book that said doing the same thing every day and expecting a different result is a form of insanity. And I would say, if you’re self-employed and you don’t do the same thing every day, that is a form of insanity. I mean, if you’re not doing the tedious follow-up and the daily huddles with your staff, Matt,

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if you ever stop recruiting people and stop doing those daily huddles where you go over the same thing every day at OxyFresh. If you ever stop doing the interviews and stop doing the huddles, the daily follow-up, the daily huddles, what would

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happen very quickly, Matt? Well, think about it. Let’s say for like 30 working days in a row you guys have a meeting and it’s a group and you start going and in that meeting let’s just talk about reviews. You go on reviews. How important reviews are. Let’s have a goal for them, a daily goal, a weekly goal. And you did that for 30-something days in a row, but then on your 31st day you didn’t do it do you think your employees would think that it doesn’t matter to you anymore or do you think they would think

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that it’s just as important I would as an employee would say well it’s not really on the agenda anymore since we didn’t have the meeting we didn’t go over it so I’m gonna focus maybe on other things like you set the tone for your company I can personally tell you every great thing that’s ever happened to my business was because of me and every bad thing that’s ever happened to my business was because of me right everything starts and stops with the

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owner and so it’s not just all the good things. I can look back to every problem I ever had. And if you drill it down, it always comes back to me every single time. Right? And so if you get that way as an owner,

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then you no longer say, well, that guy sucks. Right? That employee didn’t do what he wanted. Like, no, I didn’t put enough emphasis on what I thought was important for that person either to either respect me enough to do it

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or even understand how important it is to my company. Super simple.

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But you have to accept that though, Matt, that you as the owner have to go over the same tedious things. I mean, in my mind, it’s not depressing, it’s actually empowering, but you have to get to a place where you recognize

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if you do not go over the same thing every day with the Daily Huddle, and you do not do the ongoing recruiting, if you do not follow up, it’s gonna get bad. I mean, and Matt, some people say, I just, I hate going over the same thing.

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I just went over it last week. What do you say to someone who has that question, Matt?

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I would say, how important is it to you?

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Right?

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Like, how easy is it to go over the same thing every time? You know, it’s not that you’re recreating anything any given day. You’re literally repeating yourself every time. Maybe with a little bit more emphasis, maybe a little bit, maybe put some examples on there.

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But there’s nothing easier than repeating something two days in a row or five days in a row. It’s mindless and I would tell you if you don’t, if as the owner you do not want to keep repeating it, you think your employees are going to

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keep repeating what you’re asking them to do? Probably not. Okay so let’s let’s drill down to one specific thing here with a little bonus round question for you. You know Google reviews, I mean you guys do a great job wowing your customers but you have to get Google reviews and Oxifresh right now, and I’m not exaggerating, there’s no hyperbole at all, Oxifresh is one of the most highest rated companies in the world. I mean, you guys have, how many Google reviews does the brand have overall now? Are we at 250,000 or more as a brand?

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It’s got to be more, yeah. We’re getting hundreds a day for sure.

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I’m just saying, I mean, you guys, and so, but again, that’s true, but you guys have to get Google reviews and you have to obsessively do it. I mean, it is a thing where if you do not obsessively follow up every day, Matt, at Oxifresh, you guys aren’t going to have the success you’re having. If we go to Google right now, we go to Oxifresh.com, Oxifresh.com has 309,000 reviews. And Matt, I mean, you go over that every day.

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Am I exaggerating? Do you go over that every day to tell your guys hey well the customer step one step to get a review yeah I mean here’s the thing I

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the reason I bring up that thing is because I just bought like I said just bought a house my wife we’re moving back and forth like I did take my eye off the ball for like three days I go look at my schedule when I kind of come up for air and I look in our software it allows my employees when the job is done to push a link it automatically sends it to the customers they can review it’s mindless right I we were setting less than 50% of our jobs the links so so you know what even that small amount of time where I’m not like put press

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putting pressure on my employees to do that they just backed off a little bit right and so that’s a perfect example so I got all over them I said you know it’s my fault because I wasn’t actually on it like you guys are but you don’t give me like a day or two where I can just do my own thing without having to come back. So yeah, it’s 100% and to your point, I know that I took my off the ball and it’s still my fault.

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Did I get on them for not doing it? Yes, but at the end of the day, it is my fault. Because I put so much emphasis on it for so many years, when I take my foot off the pedal, my employees also think it’s not important to me. I can never change the behavior of my employees.

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I can only get them used to behavior that I will like, consistency, consistency, consistency.

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This is so powerful.

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That’s what’s gonna happen this week.

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So this is so powerful, I hope somebody took some notes. Matt Klein, thank you so much. And again, folks, if you wanna learn more information about buying an Oxifresh franchise, go to oxifresh.com, oxifresh.com. Matt Klein, we’ll talk to you next week.

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Thanks, guys.

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See you, brother. Okay, folks, on part one of today’s show and now on part two of today’s show, we’re talking about the same topic and I encourage everyone to write it down, think about it, pray about it, form a small committee about it. Is it worth becoming self-employed? Is it worth

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it? Now let me just be very real with you. The responsibility that comes with being self-employed is a seven-day-a-week thing. So you might delegate to elevate, you know, if you listen to a lot of Drake songs. You may build an org chart which allows you to escape the daily workflow to a certain extent. But at the end of the day, the buck stops with you. The responsibility is your issue.

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Nobody, it’s nobody’s fault. The success or failure of the company is nobody’s fault but your own. And these ideas are very difficult, very controversial in a world where people want to blame somebody else.

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And so before we introduce today’s guest, I wanna just get a brief little anecdotal update here from James about this. So James, you were in New Jersey. You just got back, am I correct? Yes. How many minutes ago did you walk into the building? Maybe like 30 minutes

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ago. Yeah, so you just flew in from New Jersey. I did. And we’ve got Eric Trump and we have Robert Kiyosaki and we have the best-selling author of The Carnivore Diet. He’s coming in for the conference. I mean, it’s a packed house. But when you came in, I gave you a to-do list and I want to recap what I gave you and see if I’m missing something. All right. I said, hey, I need you to chop wood. Boom, done.

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And I need you to make sure that the build that we’re adding on seating here, we are out of physical seating for the conference. So I said, I need you to get with the contractor, Greg, and make sure he has all the supplies and things that he needs because we got to build this thing. Is there anything else you’re supposed to do while you from the time you walked in the door to now?

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Well, I got to call the leads, Clay.

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You got to call the leads and?

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And I got to call more leads.

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And I’m like, hey, hop on the podcast too. And the podcast. And then you were gone. I was like, hey, make sure you stay on top of the leads, right? Right.

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And that’s your normal, right?

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That is my normal. So you just talk to Greg.

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He’s a great guy.

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Greg, right? Right. And I’ll be meeting with Greg at 7.30 a.m. tomorrow at his shop.

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And what kind of crap do we need to get done to build this thing? We got to add an extra upper deck seating.

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Right. So we need lumber.

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We need nails.

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We need, you know, the plan. And so you’re going to go by and are you bringing by payment? Are you picking up supplies? You’re bringing by your truck. What are you doing?

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I’m going to be driving my truck there, picking up the lumber and bringing it

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back, and I might have to buy one or two things in that process as well.

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Backhanded compliment. I’m not attacking Greg, by the way. I love Greg. It’s just a thing of I have to get it done. Right. I can’t believe that Greg’s going to get it done.

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I don’t have any problem with Greg. I love Greg, by the way. But it’s on me. It’s my responsibility to make sure that every single seat that we’ve sold for the conference physically exists. Right.

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And no one had, I expect no one to think about these things except for me, right? Well, I’m thinking about them because I sold these suckers.

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You know what I’m saying though? Yeah.

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But I think it would be easy to delegate that to a contractor and just go, well, it’s their problem. Exactly. So let’s get back to it. Is it, is it a good idea to be self-employed? If you’re self-employed and you’re on a boat, you’re still self-employed.

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You’re self-employed and you’re on vacation, you’re still self-employed. If you’re self-employed and the sky is falling, you’re still self-employed. You’re still self-employed. So Dr. Sherwood, I want to talk to you about this. You’re one of the most respected doctors in America. Your website is Sherwood.tv, Sherwood.tv.

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We’ve had the honor and pleasure of working with you for several years now. You have thousands of customers all across the country. You do enjoy time freedom. You do enjoy financial freedom. But talk to the listeners out there about the responsibility that you have to maintain your body and your business as a guy who prides yourself in basically you’re selling that,

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hey, look, you stay fit. You want to help your customers stay fit. So you hold yourself accountable for that, and you hold yourself accountable for delivering what your company promises. Talk to us about that responsibility. Well my wife and I had this discussion literally my day. You know a lot of time people think that being self-employed, being an entrepreneur is all that and a

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bag of chips. You know you have all this freedom, you don’t work hard, somebody has it for you. That could not be farther from the truth. There are several things that I’ve learned over time and it’s there’s there’s it’s to echo what you’re saying, I’ve got several sayings that I’ve coined over time. You cannot expect what you did not inspect. That’s number one.

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So you can’t just delegate it and believe it’s going to be done.

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You’ve got to go see it. You’ve got to feel it. Because if it’s not done, it may not be your fault, but it is still your responsibility. You still have to own it. You don’t get away from it.

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When you’re off, you’re never off. My cell phone is there. My connection is there. And wherever I go, a lot of people don’t get this either in my job, in my life, I am the business card. My wife and I are the business cards.

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What we walk around is a business card. I’m not going to act like, look like a soup sandwich because why would anybody want what I’ve got?

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It is like I am the business card and I’ve got no opportunity. What does a soup sandwich educate me? I don’t know how I was born.

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Yeah, a soup sandwich is like this, and I’ll just be very descriptive and candid with this. A soup sandwich is when a person shows up looking very sloppy, dirty, dumpy, having Dunlap disease. Now, what is Dunlap disease?

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The belly dunlapped over the belt, right?

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Oh, come on.

1
Okay, so now I understand. I’m getting it. So let’s go back. We have some questions from people closer to yesterday than yourself. So we’re going to go to Jessie. This is her first day in the office. Jenny, how do you even spell your first name? Educate us. It’s on the block. Oh, okay. I spell it is G-E-N-I. G-E-N-I. My friends call me Jenny.

13
Hey, can you get a little bit closer to the mic too? Just a little bit closer. Okay. And

1
what question would you have for Dr. Sherwood about being self-employed?

13
Well, I guess I would say, how do you manage that family time, especially when you’re always on work 24-7 and like you said, you always have your phone on with you. So how do you give those moments to your family? Because I…

1
This is powerful. And again, this is a show. This is not a show designed to motivate you to become self-employed. This is a show to say if you want to become self-employed, this is what you must do. Dr. Sherwood, what say you?

1
Yeah, so it’s really about how do you become successful at being self-employed, because Jenny, what you said is a very important deal. How much people get so invested in their business that they lose their family, you can’t do that. There is a balance there you have to maintain. The only way to maintain that balance is to be very structured, organized, predictable, reliable, and trustworthy with your time.

1
For example, I get up in the morning, I’ve got my quiet time, I’ve got my prayer time, I’ve got my time where I pray, my time where I pray for my wife. Honestly, I do that by myself. Nobody makes me. I do that because it’s important. Then I go exercise. With my wife, I dedicate time. I’m working with my wife every day, by the way, blessed am I, but I spend time with my wife every night. We put 30 minutes aside to actually check in with each other. How are you?

3
How are you? These questions are open-ended questions. We have that time of connection. Every Friday night, Jenny, every Friday night, more or none, we will have a date night, and I don’t care who calls. I really don’t.

3
The answer is no, that’s time with my wife. And then certainly we structure a quarterly, at least, four-day weekend trip to get away. We do that quarterly, every quarter. We plan these in advance for the year, and then twice a year or twice annually, we schedule a time with 10 days or more out of the country typically. So we go on a good trip, a away trip. Now you’re still gonna work sometimes, but when you’re working in a beautiful place with your beautiful wife,

3
that’s a pretty cool, beautiful life. That’s part of the perks, if you will, of being self-employed. But you’ve gotta be very dedicated with your time. I put aside time to return emails, to return text messages,

3
and I’m very prompt with my time, just like Clay is. We’ve talked about this many times. That dude right there on the other end of this microphone is predictable as the sun coming up in the morning. That’s what you’re going to do without question.

3
You can’t be flippant, you can’t be flaky, you can’t be fly by night, and you can’t be chaotic. You’ve got to be very organized, diligent, and predictable. Now, okay, I want to go back to this idea real quick. This is a story, James, I want to go back to you and then we’ll bring on here, I’m going to try to get everybody involved in today’s show.

3
I’ll bring in Anthony in just a second. James, can I tell you the story that’s a little secret

1
between you and me and everybody watching?

12
I’d love to hear it.

1
This is a story that just happened. I mean, this is old news. This is like right now. Okay, so it’s like right now. It happened like minutes ago, okay? So we have this show we’re gonna do.

1
I sent Dr. Sherwood the link. We wanna hop on the show at three, okay? And I’ve got this wonderful longtime business partner. I’ll be very vague here. And he has an emergency today. I mean, he’s got an emergency.

1
Ethical dilemma. What do you do? You know? And so, you know, this is one of these cowbell moments. What do you do? Right? So, he’s like, dude, I need to talk to you now. I’m just being real. I’m not saying you should agree with me.

1
And I just said, it’s not going to happen. And he’s like, are you serious? I love you so much, but we will not be having this conversation, whatever this conversation is, until 7 30 tonight. He’s like, dude. Now to add to this story, the true story, when he called me with his emergency, he was in a panic mode because he was, it had nothing to do with his, he’s, he’s calling me. We need to talk. Okay. It’s a true story. We need to talk. I said,

1
okay. He’s like, and dude, ABC one, two, three. And he goes, oh my God, I just hit a car.

39
Boom.

1
So he’s already having a problem. But this is a guy I’ve known for years who hits cars a lot. So once I discovered he wasn’t dead, not only did I not elevate the urgency of the situation, but I know this is what he does. Because this is the guy who’s famous for leaving his phone in the bathroom and then going, this is the guy who goes to the airport and doesn’t bring the wallet.

1
You know what I’m talking about. This is a make and model. Right. And so I don’t feel bad that I’m not gonna call the guy back until after the show and until after my next meeting with Revitalize Medical Spa,

1
and then not until after my next meeting with my incredible wife, then after my next meeting with my kids, we’ll call that dinner, then after my next meeting. I don’t even, I don’t, I’ve been self-employed so long,

1
I don’t feel bad. So help me, James. Why do people feel bad? I don’t feel bad telling an adult, man, I love you so much, but I’m not going to call you back till 730. Why do people feel bad about that? I don’t know why people feel bad about a lot of different things, but especially that one.

1
But you see it though, right?

12
I do see it. And some people, they might not have the courage to tell them, no, maybe that’s it.

1
Is that it? It could be. What about like when we sell out all the tickets and you have to tell somebody we’re sold out? Do you feel bad? No, never. I tell them to get to the next one at that point. Okay, but I think, Dr. Sherwood, there is a thing where entrepreneurs feel bad about saying no, the no-go zone. I don’t feel bad because I know this situation. It’s with a long-time client who

1
I like and respect. We have our weekly meeting time and I know because I heard the conversation, It’s just a burning fire based upon his failure to plan. I love the guy, but his failure to plan does not necessitate an emergency for me. And so Dr. Sherwood, though, a lot of business owners, though, they will allow somebody’s failure to plan

1
to create an emergency for them. What say you, Dr. Sherwood? Yeah, in my line of work, obviously, we’re in the longevity, performance, wellness space, as you know, and we’re not free. So we used to, and this is going to sound, I mean, I’m being very transparent right now.

1
We used to feel bad knowing full well we could help everybody. And we used to feel bad when someone would come and do the begging thing, you know, do it for free, that kind of stuff. But I learned over time that I was doing them a disservice by putting them in a position where there was creating a codependency instead of a self-independency. And so you can help somebody by saying no sometimes. So I had to learn to say no and not feel bad about it because if I said yes,

1
it was hurting both them and their ability to sort of manage self, and it was hurting me as a business owner because I was spending too much time spinning around people that really didn’t care about what I did. They didn’t really care about what I did in the sense that I was trying to help them. We’ve learned over time that saying no sometimes is the best thing you can do to somebody else. I’m going to go to Rihanna on this. Rihanna, every week, you’ve been here, you’ve worked here now for a while and you do a great

1
job. Why am I always… There’s three things every business owner, if you’re listening to today’s show, you have to do these three things. Every day, you have to get up before you see your employees. You need to get up at least two hours, or I’ll tell you, at least two hours

1
before you see your employees, and you have to make a plan, step one. Step two, you can never stop hiring. You can never stop recruiting good people, never stop recruiting good people. And three, you have to have a daily huddle

1
before you follow up with your team. Rihanna, why can we never stop hiring an elephant in the room in the haircut chain?

10
Because there’s always going to be someone that decides randomly one day, you know what, I don’t feel like doing it anymore. And so you have to have someone continuously who’s going to be able to replace them. So that way your business doesn’t fail.

1
Now, okay. And I’m not looking for specific details on this, but has it shocked you how often employees have like crazy personal problems?

10
Absolutely not. No. Does it shock you?

1
When you were in high school, were you seeing this level of personal problems?

10
Honestly, no.

1
Honestly. Is it more personal problems now in the workplace than it was in high school?

10
Yeah, for sure. And they don’t know how to leave it at the door either. They want to bring it in. They want to talk to customers about it. They want to talk to coworkers about it because they want someone to feel bad for them too.

1
Stream of consciousness. Think of the kinds of problems that employees have presented you as a manager, you’re a manager, that has nothing to do with the workplace. What are the kinds of problems that they will present to you? It has nothing to do with the workplace.

10
Oh, my dog got out and I have to go and check on them right now.

1
That’s a real situation.

10
Yeah, yeah. Or like, oh, they threw up this morning. I can’t come into work. Or, let’s see, oh, my cousin, my cousin’s having like an existential crisis right now and I need to go and comfort them immediately.

1
These are all real things.

31
Yeah.

1
So, this weekend, Sunday was a great day, Sunday. Jenny, how was your Sunday? Was your Sunday a good Sunday?

10
Yeah, I would say Sunday was pretty chill, spending it with my family.

1
Was your family? Sure. What were you doing on Sunday?

3
I actually worked a little bit in the afternoon. I worked about three and a half hours yesterday afternoon. I carved out time on Sunday to prepare for Monday, because Monday can be a little bit of a challenging day,

1
so I carve out time for preparation. And then, Anthony, what were you doing on Sunday?

14
Sunday, I went to church. After church, I went and shared a meal

8
with an individual who wanted to celebrate my graduation.

1
Okay, so let me tell you what happened for me on Sunday there, Anthony. My wife’s at a cheerleading competition, okay? Yeah. My wife says, please call me, text me, check in, how you doing? I said, sure, I want to, I want to do this.

1
So I check my phone on the way to church, contact my wife, how’s it going? A text message comes in, she says, I’m doing great, Scarlett’s competing at this time, Angelina’s competing at this time, competing at this time, so excited. I said, great, text message, two of them, they’re coming in, and I look, and it’s an employee that says, can we talk? I know what that means.

1
So I call the employee, this is before church, and I go, hey, I don’t know if you know, but, and here comes big story, big issue. So what we had was we had a former, and just see if you can follow this.

8
Okay.

1
An employee of mine, sure, let’s see if you can follow this story. An employee of mine impregnated an employee of ours. So an employee of mine… This is like, Rihanna, imagine you’re managing somebody and they impregnate somebody on the team.

10
Yep.

6
Okay?

1
Wow. And they do this and they also stole money, et cetera, et cetera. So we fired the employee. We’ll call them the impregnator. So the impregnator has now started, has gone to work for a competitor and they have now spent their entire Saturday, which precedes Sunday, calling all of our employees to try to get our employees to go join them.

1
And they’ve insinuated that they left working for me because I committed moral faux pas. But they failed to mention that they are the ones who are the great impregnator slash money fever. And so the question I have for you, Anthony, what do you do as a business owner on your beloved Sunday when you have now you have to get a hold of the employees, you have to solve the problem, but you have life balance that matters. What do you do when life

1
balance matters? What do you do, Anthony? What is the moral conundrum?

15
What do you do? You take the time to take care of what you need to take care of with the family and that moral dilemma and that balance. But then you take what’s going on into account and you tackle it accordingly.

38
Okay.

1
So Sherwood, I’m just, so what I did is I went to church and after church, I spent the next seven consecutive hours contacting our staff, letting them know what was going on, solving the problems, you know, putting, fixing the hole in the dam and Sherwood, that’s the part that a lot of business owners, they’re not, people aren’t ready for when they become self-employed. They don’t they don’t know about that part, but that part happens every week

1
that kind of thing. Sherwood, what say you? What do you do with those kinds of situations? Because again, you’ve been self-employed long enough, this isn’t new to you. What do you do when you know you’ve had a wonderful planned schedule, you’ve prepackaged everything, and then the universal jackassery from outside forces contaminates your perfect day? Well, obviously as an entrepreneur, you’re not just a business owner, you’re a parent, a counselor, a mentor, a principal, a referee, a disciplinarian, you’re all those things.

1
And you have to get in the middle of it because on the work-life balance thing, and this is people that think through this, I want my wife and I’s relationship to be second to none. Only my relationship with God takes priority there. But I also know at the time if I’m dealing with stuff that I failed to deal with. In other words, if I didn’t get in the middle and deal with that like you did, that whole thing is going to continue to fester like a cancer and it’s going to get worse and that will interfere with my work-life balance. So as an entrepreneur, you have to get in and preemptively, prehabilitatively deal with things before they become worse and that’s that’s where you got to keep your eyes

1
Ears art all your sensors within that thing because it can absolutely go Implosion on you in a hurry if you’re not into it So again, I mentioned these examples because this is the stuff behind the stuff and I’m part two of today’s show We’re interviewing Michael Gerber the best-selling author of the emith book series where he talks about how to create a business that creates time, freedom and financial freedom. And I would say everything he says during this interview, I agree with him.

1
And I want to add on, you have to plan for the burning fires that come with owning a business. And so if you’re out there today and you say, if your number one life goal is time, freedom and financial freedom, if that’s your number one thing, life balance, I highly recommend you do not board the entrepreneurship, follow that analogy, I would highly recommend you don’t board

1
the entrepreneurship because there’s a responsibility that comes with that. However, if you want to achieve financial success and have success in a lot of areas with time freedom, most of the time, self-employment is a great route.

1
But I think there’s somebody out there right now that’s wrestling with that. Dr. Sherwood, final question I have for you and then I want to ask, I want to give the team an opportunity to ask any follow-up questions. To be an entrepreneur, you have to get good at mastering

1
the small details, and you have to practice until perfect. Not practice, you have to practice until you can’t get it wrong. You don’t practice until perfect, you practice until you can’t get it wrong. You have to master it.

1
So when patients go to Sherwood.tv and they’re looking for a doctor they can trust, you can’t get bored with seeing patients, treating patients, and helping patients get well. You have to master that craft. And I think for a lot of entrepreneurs,

1
it becomes maddening, mastering or doing the same things repetitively. So for you, I know working out is a big part of your life and you do it every day and you eat every day the same way. Can you talk about mastering those, doing the same, mastering your daily routine.

1
Can you talk about that? Cause there’s somebody out there that their head is going to explode because they keep going over the same things every day

3
Well, I made the decision a long time ago that two things happened in my life one I wasn’t gonna let anyone out work me in other words I’m gonna work harder than everybody else because I want to eliminate this thing called excuses which can become pathetically habitual in one’s life and Secondly, you never stop learning right? I never have something mastered. It didn’t matter how good I get at it. There’s always something I can learn from every patient. There’s

3
something I can learn from her workout. There’s something I can learn from her podcast, every encounter, every conversation I have with Clay Clark, anybody else. I can learn something. Become a lifelong learner of the situations and you become better at seeing around the corners. When I was on the SWAT team years ago, previous career, one of the things I learned with this principle is look around the corners before you round the corner.

3
If you do that, you can keep yourself out of harm’s way. It’s always learning the techniques you’re talking about, learning to get better and better and better. The last thing I’ll say with that is you’ve got to make your best better every day.

1
Okay, Jenny, do you have a follow-up question for Dr. Sherwood? Do you have any follow-up question you want to ask him about being self-employed? Now, again, I know that you were born closer to yesterday. I know you’re a college student. I know that you have zero show prep for today’s show. I grab you right out of your workstation on your first maybe day of work. You were probably doing onboarding paperwork and I’m like, ha ha, hop on the show. But do you have any follow-up question for Dr. Sherwood?

13
Um, yeah, I guess this one’s a little bit more specific, but what’s the most difficult

11
time you’ve had to say no to someone like especially if they were like a close like family member. Hmm

1
Yeah, that’s a good question Jenny. So I’ll give you a specific There is a person that I’ve known for a number of years It’s a really good friend and for a number of years. I had to look back on it I would hear from him occasionally to say hello But he was always asked me a question and it was always a question about free medical advice. And I thought, you know, it’s my duty, my honor to help him,

1
you know, because he’s my friend. I kept giving it to him, giving it to him for the grand total fee that he paid me of zero. And I thought, okay, that’s fine, you’re gonna give, you know, and then we’ll give them back to you. I thought all the, you know, the Christian terms

1
I had learned in my lifetime. But then I realized after I found out that he was paying big bucks for a physician to do nothing for him and was getting free information from me, I had to tell him one day, listen, I’m not going to answer your questions about medical advice anymore. You’re my friend, but I’m not going to allow our relationship to be abused by you anymore

1
because I feel like you’re taking advantage of me while you’re paying somebody else you don’t know big bucks over here to not give you anything. And so you’re asking me to do this stuff for you for free. Very hard, very difficult. He doesn’t speak to me anymore, but perhaps he wasn’t my friend anyway, and perhaps he

3
was just using me. Hard lesson, but true lesson.

1
You know, James and I, we used to do that to you all the time. We would call you up there, Sherwood, and I’d say, hey, Dr. Sherwood, a friend of mine has a monkeypox. Monkeypox. I have monkeypox.

16
Yeah.

1
Different story. And I send you a photo, and you’re like, Clay, is that you? And I’m like, no, it’s a friend of mine. And you’re like, Clay, stop sending me those photos. I’m like, well, a friend of mine. You know, I’m calling on behalf of a friend, you know, that sort of thing.

1
If you follow up a question you have for Dr. Sherwood, because again, he’s a self-employed doctor. We’re talking today about is being self-employed right for you? What question would you have there?

10
Yeah. How do you tackle interactions with soup sandwiches or people who just aren’t as motivated as you?

9
What’s your process for that?

1
Yeah, that’s a good question. So I tackle it with love, honestly. I mean, I’m using that term in a funny manner, not trying to be derogatory, but it’s like I have to tackle it with love. In that situation, if someone wants to talk to me about health and they look like a soup that term, I’m going to say, look, why would somebody want what you obviously don’t believe?

1
In other words, you talk about this thing called health, but you’re obviously not modeling that. And I said, I want to help you do this. So my job is to help you as a friend with love. I want you to make all kinds of money, and I want you to help all kinds of people and I want you to have If they’re not a clinician or not in this job, I want to help you have a good life and not die too early

1
I want to help you enjoy your grandkids that you don’t even know because they haven’t been born yet I want to give that to you and I want to deprive you of sickness and disease and unnecessary Suffering so I tackle it like that Showing them that I do love them It’s like the Samaritan that got in the ditch with the person that fell into the hands of Robert.

1
He didn’t just leave him there and say, poor baby. He got him out of the ditch.

3
Sometimes it takes a little pain to do that.

1
I took notes there. He said you’ve got to tackle the problem with gloves, James. In OJ Simpson kind of way. You tackle the problem with gloves. OJ Simpson kind of way. That’s what I was inferring there.

1
I’ll just continue to take notes here. Now, James, final segment here we have. We’ve got this conference coming up, and not tomorrow, but the next day we’re interviewing Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki, and James, we’re selling these tickets,

1
these ultra-premium tickets, and I just wanna do a quick rundown because these are hot tickets here. So first off, James, what do we call these ultra-premium? You have the general admission, which are 250 or whatever you wanna pay.

1
You got the VIPs, which are $500, but then you have the ultra-premium next-level tickets. What are those called, James? They’re the crow’s nest. And so these seats will literally be above all the other seats in the office.

12
And you’ll be able to literally look down on everyone here.

1
Look down on your fellow peers.

12
Exactly.

1
In a very judgmental way. You could look down. You can get that sort of, I mean, a lot of times people buy VIP just to feel important. You can look down on your peers. That’s benefit number one.

1
Now benefit two, James, is you get to go to lunch with Sean Baker, the best-selling author of The Carnivore Diet, Eric Trump, the son of President Donald J. Trump, the man who is running the Trump Organization, Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling entrepreneur author of all time, 72 million copies sold, but there’s more. You get to have lunch with Great Governor! What?

16
Yeah!

1
Okay, come on! If you want to have lunch with somebody who pretends to embody the conservative values that we love and trust, if you want to have lunch with a governor who imposed lockdowns while talking about how he shouldn’t have lockdowns, if you want that sort of a lunch with a governor, James, we’re going to make that happen for you. You could ask him why he locked down.

1
You could ask him that. He probably won’t answer, but you could ask him, right? That’s a great question to ask. Many people are saying, I would love to have lunch with a deep state governor, right?

12
I know I am, yeah.

35
I know a lot of people are.

1
I mean, that’s exciting. What else, James, do they get? Well, so Robert Kiyosaki is going to have dinner with the Crows Nest ticket buyers as

12
well, at your house.

37
Oh my goodness.

6
It’s incredible.

1
Wow. Wow. What else, James? There’s more.

8
There’s more James. So, you know what? We’re going to drive the white van over to the launch and this white van, Clay’s white

12
van, people don’t know, but it’s got 150,000 original miles.

1
Original. We did not roll back the odometer. And James, a lot of people say, I have to compensate because I’m not a person who’s very confident in myself. So I have to put leather interior in my car to impress people I don’t know and I have to remove any cracks in the windshield?

1
That’s not the kind of person I am, James. In my vein, what kind of interior do we have, James? It’s a beautiful leather interior. That’s not leather! It’s a couple stains. James, you know what kind of interior we have in there.

1
Are you lying to our listeners, James? It’s like a fake leather? It’s cloth interior. Cloth.

12
You’re a snitch.

1
I’m always driving the thing, so. Okay, James, how many cracks do we have on that windshield?

12
A lot.

1
Pretty much the whole thing is a crack. Those are original cracks. Now, James, how many dents does that thing have? I know I’ve put four in myself, so it’s got at least that many. This is a massive van. It also runs off of natural gas and?

1
And regular gas. All of this could be yours. And how much are those tickets? I mean, James, these tickets are a fraction of what, I mean, if a Trump meme coin is worth three billion dollars, I mean, this is probably worth, you know, a trillion dollars, but we’re going to give you a discount.

12
It’s honestly so crazy.

1
So each ticket is only $2,500. Oh, make me cry.

12
Yeah, and we’ve sold three, we’ve got three left, and to have lunch with the sitting president of the United States of America’s son, that’s priceless. You go to CPAC, you’re paying like $20,000 for that or more, and then you’re not even

1
sitting down with an Eric Trump. Think about this, you could sit down with the Deep State Governor and you could say, hey, when you were allowing Oklahoma to be locked down and allowing businesses to be determined as to what businesses were essential or not, what were you thinking? And they can’t go anywhere.

5
And you could ask them that in front of Eric Trump.

1
Right, you could do that. Or you could say, think about this, this is what I would do if I was going to lunch, I’d say, hey, deep state governor, with all due respect, why did you endorse Ron DeSantis and then how the hell did you end up at this lunch?

12
Right. Oh my goodness. I love that question.

1
These are the questions I would ask him.

35
Wouldn’t you ask him that?

12
I wish I could.

1
I would also ask him, like, hey, how come you’re going to be at this lunch, but you never listened to Clay Clark’s podcast?

8
Right.

1
They could ask it. He doesn’t even know we’re saying this. These are all the things you can do. It’s going to be a blast, Sherwin. I am excited. Sherwin, are you excited?

1
I mean, maybe you should get one of these ultra-premium VIP tickets so you can also sit next to the deep state governor. I think if I show up there and got his presence, the arrogance would be so emitting from him that he’d be fuming. Okay, well, maybe that’s part of the package. Yeah.

1
Okay, so again, folks, if you’re looking for a doctor you can trust, let me pull up the website here at SureWood.tv. If you’re looking for a non-doctor that you really can’t trust with medical advice, I’m available, folks. You just send me a text. I’ll tell you what I think it is.

1
I’ll look at it and say, that’s probably gout. I’ll say that. Probably pre-cancerous.

36
I’d cut it off.

1
I mean, that’s why. So again, that’s SureWood.tv. That’s the website. SureWood.tv, that’s the website. If you’re looking for a doctor you can trust, there’s three things, three great solutions

1
he provides and more. One, they do health optimization. If you need to lose weight, look in great shape, that’s SureWood.tv, they help you. Second, if you’re looking for supplements that are designed to be organic, healthy additives

1
to your healthy diet there, go to SureWood.tv. And finally, if you’re saying, I need a doctor I can trust. I mean, if you’re saying, you know, bird flu, COVID, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m terrified. What do I do? If you want a doctor you can trust that won’t do mandates, lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, check it out. Sherwood.tv. Dr. Sherwood, I’ll give you the final 15 seconds, sir. What say you?

1
No, I think one of the blessings, and then we talked about being an entrepreneur, one of the blessings about being an entrepreneur is you can teach people the principles of being independent. I think that’s the thing that we need to do in our country. We’ve become so dependent upon other people, systems, government, et cetera. Truly, the spirit of this country is based upon independence, and that’s the spirit of entrepreneurship. So I encourage people to get on the ship if you have the courage to do that

1
and learn to be independent, and then you can learn to experience the life that we all have,

3
opportunity to have here in this country.

1
Folks, on that ship theme, remember, if you go to Sherwood.tv, you can, James, I don’t know if you know this, you can ship your Sherwood shakes, you can ship your protein, your supplements, but you can’t ship your pants at Sherwood.tv.

1
He does a great service.

35
Thank you.

16
Wow, wow, wow.

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I really appreciate you.

1
We’ll talk to you next week. Take care, bye bye. Dead Radio Show.

7
Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re closed, 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 Trump, but we’re also talking about money,

7
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.

1
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?

1
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

1
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 wanna tell you thank you sir for changing my life.

7
But 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.

7
Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there too, or bad influencers.

16
Yeah.

7
Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say,

7
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. Hi, I’m Ryan Wimpey.

2
And I’m Rachel Wimpey, and the name of our business is Kip Top.

11
Our business is a dog training business. We help people with behavioral issues and teach their dog how to listen.

2
When I was learning to become a dog trainer, we didn’t learn anything about internet marketing or advertising or anything at all. Just dog training. And that’s what’s so great about working with Clay and his team because they do it all for us. So that we can focus on our passion and that’s training dogs.

11
Clay and his team for the last five months,

2
two of which have been our biggest months ever. One, our biggest gross by 35%. Clay’s helped us make anything from brochures to stickers, new business cards, new logos, scripts for phones, scripts for emails, scripts for text messages, scripting for everything.

11
How I would describe the weekly meetings with Clay and his team are awesome. They’re so effective. It’s worth every minute. Things get done, we’ll ask for things like different flyers, and they’re done before our hour is up. So it’s just awesome, extremely effective.

2
If you don’t use Clay and his team, you’re probably going to be pulling your hair out or you’re going to spend half of your time trying to figure out the online marketing game and producing your own flyers and marketing materials, print materials, all this stuff like that. You’re really losing a lot as far as lost productivity and lost time. Not having a professional do it has a real sense of urgency and actually knows what they’re

2
doing when you already have something that’s your core focus that you already know how

34
to do.

11
You would also be missing out with all the time and financial freedom that you would have working with Clay and his team.

2
We would recommend Clay and his team to other business owners because they need to be working on their business, not just trying to figure out the online game, which is complex and changing daily. So, and no one has a marketing team, too. Most people don’t. They can’t afford one, and their local web guy or local person that they know probably

2
can’t do everything that a whole team and a whole floor of people can do in hours and not just weeks or months. There’s a definite sense of urgency with Clay and his team. I used to have to ride other web people, I mean, really ride them to get stuff done. And stuff is done so fast here. And people, there’s a real sense of urgency to get it done.

2
Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. Like, we have workflows that are kind of all over the place.

2
Having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is 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.

2
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.

2
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. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday.

4
Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show.

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show

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I’m a dive so if you see my wife and kids please tell them hi It’s C and Z up on your radio and now 3, 2, 1, here we go! We started from the bottom now we’re here to stay

1
We started from the bottom now we’re here to stay Yes, yes, yes, and yes Thrive Nation! Today’s a very special occasion because you never know, Josh Wilson, who you are going to meet at a Trump Hotel room. You never know when you go to the Trump Hotel in Chicago. You never know who you’re going

1
to meet there. And I met the man and the myth, the guy who is behind the E-Myth series of books that absolutely changed the way that I approach business. Michael Gerber, the author of the E-Myth, I met him there in the Chicago Hotel and I asked him if he would be on the show. He made a poor life choice and he’s decided to be here with us.

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Michael Gerber, how are you, sir?

5
Delighted to be here.

1
Oh, wow. You are just absolutely a living legend, and your book helped so many people. But before we get into your book, and specifically chapter five of your book, could you share with the listeners where you grew up and kind of your background, just so they know that you weren’t born at the top of the mountain?

3
Well, hear me, nobody is born at the top of the mountain. I certainly wasn’t. I was born in New Jersey, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, of a couple of beautiful Jewish parents and part of a growing family in 1936. In 1936, in the heart of the Depression.

3
Just as the horror was taking place in Europe, and just before the Holocaust was to take place in Europe, I grew up as a little boy in that season without any understanding of what was going on in the world around me. My parents decided to move from New Jersey to California in 1947. And we did move to Anaheim, California,

3
and I was raised in Anaheim, California. And my journey started in Anaheim, California, and my journey continued for the rest of my life to the point where you speak to me here here today. And I could go into all of that, but it is such an uninteresting story about Michael Gerber, where he was, what he did, how he did it, why he didn’t do it, what he

1
could have done. So let me ask you this. When did you kind of start to figure out, when did you start to figure out what you wanted to do professionally? What age were you when you had that idea?

5
I didn’t. I never focused on what I wanted to do. I was a jazz saxophone player. I was an encyclopedia salesman. I did this. I did that. I did that.

25
I did this.

5
All the time that I was doing that, I was reading and reading and studying and studying philosophy, spirituality, music, jazz, all the stuff anybody would ever be attracted to until I hit the age of 41. Now hear me, all of this started, Clay, then, at the age of 41.

1
41.

3
And at 41, a friend of mine who owned a small advertising agency in Silicon Valley, California, asked me if I’d meet with one of his clients, who was having difficulty converting leads that my brother-in-law’s ad agency was creating for him into sales.

5
And I told my brother-in-law, Ace, that’s his name, that’s still his name, God bless

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him.

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I said, Ace, I don’t know anything about business, and I certainly don’t know anything about high-tech business.

3
He said, Mike, you know more than you think you do. Just meet with a guy, let’s see what happens. So he’s dropped me off to meet with a guy, we’ll call him Bob. Bob had a high tech product. He had sales engineers having difficulty selling that product. And Ace dropped me off and said, Bob, Ace, Michael, guys get to know each other. I’ll be back in an hour. So obviously Bob said to me, Michael, what do you know about my business? And I

5
said nothing about it. Because I didn’t.

8
Right.

3
And he said, well, what do you know about our product?

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I said, less than that, Bob.

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And obviously, he’s looking at his watch and thinking,

5
I’ve got an hour with this guy. He doesn’t know anything. What in the hell am I going to do with him?

20
But instead, he said,

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so if you don’t know anything about my business and you don’t know anything about my product, how can you help me?

3
And I said, I haven’t a clue, Bob, but we’ve got an hour to kill. So let’s start so I can ask you some questions. And that’s how all this started. I began to ask Bob questions and I realized, despite the fact that he owned a small business, despite the fact that he was the CEO of a small business, despite the fact that he thought of himself as an entrepreneur starting that small business, every answer Bob gave me was anecdotal.

3
There was no facts underlying anything he said. So I’d ask more, and then I’d ask more, and then I’d ask more, and then I’d ask more. I suddenly realized I did know something about business. I knew that selling is a system, and I knew that Bob didn’t have one.

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Thrive Nation, that deserves a quick timeout right there. That is absolutely huge. In order to create time freedom and financial freedom, again, in order to create both time and financial freedom, you must create systems that are both repeatable and quickly learnable. You have to create sales systems that other people can implement who are not you. And that way you can quickly train new members of your team how to create a repeatably, predictably successful system for sales.

1
Otherwise, again, it always comes down to you doing the selling. You’ve got to create repeatable systems that wow the customers each and every time. So I would ask you today, specifically, when somebody calls your business phone, how is the phone answered? And if you don’t know the answer to that, make a call script for answering your phones. You need to have a call script for answering your

1
phones. You need to have a pre-written email that you send to new potential clients. You need to have a frequently asked questions script so that way when anybody calls you and asks your new hire frequently asked questions, they’re going to have all the answers. You want to think about

1
every aspect of your system and you want to make it scalable and repeatable. You want to make sure that your on-hold music is music that is going to wow the customer each and every time. You want to make sure that every interaction with your customer is in fact scalable. It is repeatable and it does wow the customers.

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I told Bob, without a selling system you’re not going anywhere with this. He said, what’s a selling system? I said, just think of it as a script. First you say this, then you say that, then you say this, then you say that. First he does this, then he does that, then he does this, then he does that. And in the process of doing this and doing that and saying this and saying that, something

5
happens and you can predict what that’s going to be after you’ve gotten it down, really gotten it down into a groove and he said to me, well, can you create that for me? And I said, of course. So when Ace came to pick me up, he said, what happened? I said, I just got a job.

5
He said, what do you mean a job? I said, I’m now a consultant. He said, what do you mean a consultant? I said, I’m now consulting Bob on creating a selling system.

4
He said, what do you know about that?

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I said, I guess everything. And that was the beginning of it. And that was the beginning of this, that was the beginning of e-myth, that was the beginning of everything I’ve done since that point in time.

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Remember keep this planted firmly in your mind that entrepreneurship is simply solving a problem for your ideal and likely buyers in exchange for compensation. Again entrepreneurship is simply solving a problem in exchange for the compensation that you seek for your ideal and likely buyers. Think about all of the problems that you can solve for your ideal and likely buyers. Make a list of all the problems that you can solve for your ideal and likely buyers and

1
offer your customer, offer your ideal and likely buyers those solutions in exchange for the money you seek and you will create both time and financial freedom. It is that easy my friends. It is unbelievable find a problem You can solve your ideal and likely buyers and then make the system repeatable Make it scalable and make sure that it allows your ideal and likely buyers make sure that the business can work without you and you shall experience both time and

1
financial freedom So you might say I didn’t come to the realization of why it was here on the planet until I turned 40. 40 years old. Let me ask you, at the age of 40, you began to have these epiphanies, discovering that many of the people out there, most of our listeners, most people on the planet, we have bought into this thing called the E-myth, or we’ve bought into this wrong mindset to business, or this wrong way about looking at business.

1
Can you explain what the E-myth is for people out there that don’t know what the E-myth stands for?

3
Sure, the E-myth is the entrepreneurial myth. It’s based upon the assumption that everybody believes anybody and everybody who starts their own business is an entrepreneur. And the fact is they’re not. What I learned with Bob and then with Mary

3
and then with Judy and the various little companies that I worked on behalf of Ace’s ad agency, until the point it became obvious that I was going to do this on my own, not in Ace’s ad agency, because Ace didn’t believe in what I was saying either.

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But I came to realize that none of them were entrepreneurs. They were all what I came to call technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure. All they did was create a job for themselves.

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True.

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So every small business is a job for the idiot who started it.

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And now they’re working for a really big idiot themselves.

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And they’re saying to themselves, yeah, but this isn’t working. And of course it’s not working

3
because they didn’t design it to work.

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They didn’t build it to work. They didn’t launch it to work. They didn’t grow it to work.

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Right.

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How to do that, design it, build it, launch it, and grow it is what the E-Myth is all about.

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If you’re out there today and you found yourself creating a business that has created financial freedom for you, but you don’t know how to escape the wage cage, and you don’t know how to actually create time freedom to go along with that financial freedom, that’s why we have our in-person workshops and the one-on-one coaching. To learn more, go to Thrivetimeshow.com. That’s Thrivetimeshow.com. And click on the Conferences button.

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And there’s no upsells at our workshops. And you’re going to be seated by real entrepreneurs, people that actually own successful companies who are now where you once were. These are real entrepreneurs that needed to learn how to create both time and financial freedom. And many of our conference attendees come back year after year because now that they have created time and financial freedom, they want to refine the systems to make them even

1
more efficient. Or they want to receive a refresher course. Maybe they want to get re-inspired. But it’s really awesome because you’re going to be seated by real entrepreneurs just like you who own a company that is already doing well, but they just want to create both time and financial freedom at this point.

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And so I would encourage you to check it out today. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com and then click on the conferences button and book your conference tickets today. And don’t let finances be an obstacle here. If you’re in a tight spot, we have scholarship options available. Essentially, we’ll meet you where you’re at financially to make sure that the finances,

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the financial obligations of purchasing a Thrivetimeshow.com ticket are not going to exceed your ability to pay for them. And so, without any further ado, back to my interview with Michael Gerber. What I find is that some of us think that we know what we’re doing. So some of us, we think, and I was building my first company, DJ Connection, before Brent Lawless gave me her book.

1
I was having quote-unquote success. I was selling a lot of wedding packages with DJConnection.com. I was booking thousands of events. I was winning awards. I was being told I was the best entertainer. My company was great.

1
And when I read chapter five of your book, you mentioned that I was creating a job and not a business. And I started contemplating, well, what’s the difference between busyness and a business? Because they’re spelled slightly differently, but busyness, there’s a Y in there. And I don’t know why I’m in business when I’m busyness. Busyness means I don’t know why.

1
And then business means a business exists to serve me. There’s an I in business. A business exists to serve me. Okay. And I had to read that chapter over and over and over. And you challenged me in the Chicago hotel room at Trump Hotel, you challenged me to

1
read the chapter again. So I read the book again. I read it. I went through all my highlights and I took photos of them and I sent it to your wife because I wanted you to know that I had read it again. And so I would like to go into, if we can, to chapter five of your book and to page 51.

1
We’re going to open up the book, E-Myth Revisited, where you wrote, every adolescent business reaches a point where it pushes beyond its owner’s comfort zone. For me, it was DJ connection calm the boundary within which he feels secure in his ability to control his environment And outside of which he begins to lose control. That’s why I wanted to DJ 250 events Michael before your book saved me. I literally did 250 events in one year I personally made the playlist for every wedding. I did everything tons of money. No time to spend it

1
It was awesome and terrible at the same time and the world kept cheering. The world kept cheering. Help our listeners out there that are stuck in this adolescent phase where we want to control everything or we want to abdicate and assign items to members of our team who are poorly trained and then we never follow up. So we either want to do it ourselves or we want to do it ourselves or we want to assign

1
the project to somebody on our team who is poorly trained and poorly equipped to have success, and then we do a poor job of following up. Help the listeners out there, my friend.

5
So the evolution of a company from infancy to adolescence to maturity is an absolutely universal process. Most small companies, we’re talking about small companies, we’re talking about a hamburger stand, we’re talking about a meat market. We’re talking about anything and everything that depends upon somebody doing some work. The butcher does the work.

5
The gardener does the work. The hairdresser does the work. The food eclipper does the work. You understand what I’m saying? Yeah.

3
There’s work to be done. There’s work to be done in every single business on the planet. Now, some of that work is very unsophisticated. Some of that work is very sophisticated, but despite whether sophisticated or unsophisticated, every single small business owner who starts a business is actually that technician. The hairdresser starts a beauty shop.

3
The guy behind the microphone starts a thing behind the microphone. A chiropractor starts a chiropractic practice and so forth and so forth. Well, of course they do.

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Because that’s what they do. That’s what they know how to do. You’re correct.

1
Everybody, everybody starts that way. I 100% agree with you. Yeah.

3
So infancy is that startup.

5
Infancy is the very beginning. Infancy was that joyous time, Clay, at the very beginning of what you were doing behind

3
that microphone.

22
Oh, yeah.

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Where you just shined.

1
And you remember that.

5
Oh, yeah.

27
You just shined.

5
And you just shined. And you just shined. And you just shined.

31
Oh yeah.

5
You just shined.

1
Oh, it was awesome. It was a new idea and it was exciting and I did it myself and people cheered. Of course, you got up every day, you got up every day, you got up every day. Oh, tell me this story.

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You did this, you did that.

3
Absolutely, absolutely. Just like the woman in the beauty parlor. She gets up every day and she goes to work and she takes out her brush and her needles and her thing and that and that and she goes to work and the lady that comes in and the lady who follows and then the lady who follows and they schmooze and they talk and they dance and they play and they do whatever they do and the lady who comes in loves her and the

3
other one loves her and the other one loves her and so forth and so on and then she gets busy, busy, busy, busy. That’s where adolescence steps in. Your company grew beyond just beginning phase. So suddenly you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this because if you stop doing this, if you stop doing this, you’re out of business.

31
Oh yeah.

3
That’s the deal. If you stop doing this, you’re out of business. And that’s where adolescence begins to take its toll. In other words, you’ve got to get this done, you’ve got to get that done, you’ve got to get… And you can’t do everything anymore. There’s too much to do, too little time to do it. And also, you don’t know everything that needs to be done. So you’ve got to learn everything that needs to be done. Now you’re stretched, stretched, stretched, stretched.

1
Quality’s going down, you’re stretched thin, the quality’s going down, you’re dropping the ball, you’re making money, but now you’re kind of offering shoddy work, shoddy quality, you start to lose the excitement about your business. You feel trapped in your business, Michael, right? I mean, you feel trapped.

3
Yeah, and your kids begin to wonder, where’s dad?

5
Where’s dad?

26
Where’s mom?

1
Where’s mom?

5
How come you’re never home? How come you’re never… How come you’re always working? How come you’re always working? Well, I gotta work. I gotta work. I gotta work. I created this thing that depends upon me because I’m the star. So understand it’s that star issue. I’m the star. That’s when the business begins to fail. And it begins to fail big time. And what happens is, instead of doing this and doing that and doing this and doing that, instead of all of a sudden having people

5
doing it, but they’re not doing it as well as you do it, you had to bring people in, you had to bring people in, you had to bring in a bookkeeper you had to bring in a whatever they’re not doing it as well as you did it so finally you realized they don’t work as well as you do so you let them go let them go and when you let them go now it’s still there waiting to be done and now you get to do yourself again because you’ve created a job and not a business right

3
so what do you do you get small again yeah and that’s what everybody does. They grow and they shrink. And then it goes to adolescents again, and then they shrink, and finally, they’re through. So last year, there were roughly 550,000 small companies that shut their doors, not because of the pandemic. You understand the pandemic. Yeah, that’s a problem. But understand the problem I’m talking

1
about is a pandemic and has been a pandemic for generations. It’s worse than a pandemic. What you’re talking about is worse than a pandemic. This happens every year, every decade, over and over and over. And what I find, and I’d like to dive into this with you, I have a lot of people that I have been friends with over the years who they start hiring everybody, like you were just talking about. They begin hiring people, and then they begin to abdicate what they think what they’re doing

1
is to delegate. They think that they’re delegating when they’re actually abdicating. Could you talk about this? I see it with accounting almost 100% of the time, where people, they bring in someone to do their accounting, and they do not follow up with them because they’re supposed to be the expert.

1
I mean, could you help the listeners out there and maybe tell us what the difference is between abdicating and delegating?

3
Very simple. An abdication is where you turn over responsibility for something, and there is no system. There’s no method by which that result is intended to be produced. You understand when McDonald’s was first formulated, the very first franchise store, the franchise prototype in Des Plaines, Illinois, Ray Kroc went to work on that McDonald’s hamburger stand to perfect the systems in that hamburger store so that whomever he hired would master the system.

3
Master the system. The system was the solution, not the person he hired. In every case you’re talking about, where we abdicate accountability, we’re effectively turning over the responsibility to produce a result to somebody who’s going to do it whatever way they do it. And every single person we turn it over to does it differently. So there is no way we do it.

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And if there is no way we do it, there is no, in quotes, McDonald’s. There is no franchise. There is no turnkey system.

1
There is no evolution of a methodology that identifies a brand from everyone else. When you talk about a system, this might sound mean, and Michael, please feel free to argue with me if you need to here. You can straighten me out here. But I know people that say to me, business owners, who I meet at conferences or who I meet in my building, they’ll say, Clay, the system is Kara.

1
The system is Steve. The system is Josh. They are assuming that a person is the system because the person does the job. And then that key person who’s been with them since day one or maybe day 10 or maybe month 6, they move on. But I have found since implementing your approach to business, working on a business, the e-myth

1
approach, I now am no longer dependent upon personalities. So when somebody feels like it’s time to move on, I can encourage them to move on with great joy. I mean that. I can be happy for them. I don’t have to hold them hostage, and they don’t hold me hostage.

3
Because the system stays here.

16
Yeah.

5
Because you own the system. You own the brand. You own the methodology. You own the ability to produce the result that you have designed your company to produce again and again and again and again. So when people tune in, when people come in, when people come to the store, when people

5
go online, no matter where it is, online, offline, it doesn’t make any difference. It produces exactly the result they came to get because it is an intelligent system. That’s the key to the EMIC. That’s one of the critical keys to the EMIC. It’s the system, stupid.

1
I have a, before I let Josh ask you some questions, Josh with Living Water Irrigation is here. Now I want to brag on Josh. He’s grown a business from $300,000 in revenue to, he’s on pace to hit $3 million this year. But last year, Josh, what were your sales last year? What did you end the year at?

15
1.8.

1
1.8 million dollars. He’s been a client of mine for a long time, and he’s probably been tired of me referencing you. He’s probably tired of it. He’s probably saying, stop referencing me. This guy doesn’t even exist, probably.

1
He thinks you’re probably like a mythical person, but I show him the book cover, he Googles you, he verifies, he knows you’re real now, and now he’s here with you, and he has some questions for you, Michael. So, Josh, what questions do you have for the great one, Mr. Michael Gerber?

4
Well, Michael, first and foremost, thank you so much. It really honestly is an honor to speak to you. Due to you and all the coaching from Clay, it’s truly sincerely changed my life and the trajectory of it. So, first and foremost, I’m thankful and grateful, sir. Well, thank you.

4
Beyond that, my first question would be, what is the easiest way for us as a company? You know, we’re having some pretty exponential growth and we’re really excited about it, but what’s the easiest way for us to define our biggest limiting factor? For other business owners out there, what’s the easiest way to actually define that, Michael?

3
Your biggest limiting factor is what keeps you from producing what you hope to produce. Your biggest limiting factor is what keeps you from producing what you intend to produce, what you hope to produce, what your dream says you’re there to produce. And so everything starts with a dream, a vision, a purpose, and a mission. That’s the most critical thing you have to do at the beginning of all of this. I have a dream, I have a vision, I have a purpose, I have a mission.

3
thing that I’m so crazed about. When I started in 1977, we started with a dream, a vision, a purpose, and a mission. Our dream then, literally, end quote, was to transform the state of small business worldwide. Our vision was to invent the McDonald’s

3
of small business owner who was attracted to our paradigm and implemented it could be as successful as a McDonald’s franchisee or even more. And our mission was to invent the business development system that made our dream, our vision, our purpose possible.

3
So we started our company, we started with the dream, a vision, a purpose, and a mission. So the first thing I would say to you, what’s your dream? What’s your vision? What’s your purpose?

5
What’s your mission?

30
That is funny.

3
Until you then can say, our dream is our, not mine, our dream, our vision, our purpose, our mission, and explicate them clearly to every single person who joins you in your company. You’ll not truly begin to grow it to the degree it’s

5
waiting to be grown.

1
So you want our listeners to define their dream, their mission, and their purpose. Am I correct, sir? The dream, the mission, and the purpose?

29
Vision.

3
Dream, vision, purpose, mission. Step one, step two, step three, step four. The first four steps of what I call the Eightfold Path. First, my dream. My dream is the great result we’re here to produce. Second, my vision.

3
My vision is the form our dream is going to take place on the street. Our purpose, our purpose must truly transform the state of our individual customer’s mindset about who he or she is and what he or she can expect from an economic, social, relational, familiar life. And finally, our mission is to invent the system. And it’s always to invent the system. The mission is always about the system at the heart of our great growing enterprise.

3
So you see, what I’m saying is, if you take this little business of yours, just that I’m saying this, the little business of yours where you’re behind the microphone, where you’re reaching out to your audience, etc. and so forth. You take that dream, vision, purpose, and mission, you can immediately begin to see that the end result is always worldwide.

1
When you were growing the e-myth program and the book and the team, the movement, and you defined your dream and your vision and your purpose and your mission and you began to craft the book, to write the book, to work with clients, to do your research. How long did it take you, Mr. Michael Gerber, to go from consulting your first client at the age of 41 to pinning the E-Myth Revisited book? How many years was that?

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The first e-myth book called, The E-Myth, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, was published in 1985.

3
I started my company in 1977.

1
It’s eight years, eight years of data and research.

3
Before that book would ever been written, I had to do it. And so the first years from 77, 78, 79, 80, one, two, three, four, five. I was working on the Michael Thomas Corporation to design, build, launch, and grow our turnkey capability to transform the state of small business worldwide.

5
The first eight years, you were working on the business, the first eight years, and- Well, the first eight years, and then every year after that. So you got to understand, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this. Everybody wants to get it now.

5
Everybody wants to get it now. Everybody wants to get it. Can I do this in a year and a half? Can I do this in six minutes? Can I do this tomorrow? Everybody is simply stupid, stupid, stupid, Clay,

5
when they think about this. Because you can’t do anything right, right now. It takes time to absorb what in fact the implications of what you’re setting out to do really are. Because if I’m seriously saying I’m going to transform the state of small business worldwide, that means by doing what we’re planning on doing, the business failure rate is going to decrease exponentially. The business success rate is going to increase exponentially.

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The experience of people inside of companies is going to be transformed radically. Lives are going to be transformed in the process. That’s how big this is.

1
And that’s why it can’t be done in a minute. I do not want to be even slightly negative. I want to just be very practical. Be as negative as you want to be. Well I want to bring this up because I know that you look like you’re 22 years old. I mean you’re a young man.

1
But you’ve been doing this a long time. And there are certain people who do what Thomas Edison once famously wrote, he said, Vision without execution is hallucination. Vision without execution is hallucination. What percentage of the time do you sit down and meet somebody and do you find yourself saying,

1
I wish they would just implement. I mean, at what point do you say, I just wish they would implement. Is it a third of the time that people seek knowledge and they don’t want to implement? Is it a tenth of the time? How often do people seek the knowledge, you give them the knowledge, but they don’t want to implement? Because I hear so many e-myths success stories. I just want to know what percentage of people get the knowledge and they don’t want to implement?

5
You have to understand, anybody can come to me at any point in time, and I say, absolutely extraordinary. And I said, and the good news is there’s a process for doing that. And the better news is it’s a universal process, meaning you don’t have to invent it. It already exists. It’s what I call the eightfold path. Step one, step two, just like I’ve just done.

5
Now what happens at that point is what shapes what happens next. Because what happens at that point is a person might say, yeah, but I don’t want to do all that stuff.

1
All I want to do is, all I want to do, all I want to do is… All I want to do, all I want to do is…

5
I hear you, I hear you. You don’t want to do all that stuff. And I said, you have no idea what it takes to do what you just told me you wish to do. But I know exactly what it takes. And the wonderful news is we’ve got a method to make it possible for you to

1
mature in the process of discovering the truth about what it is you’re setting out to do. Step one, step two, and I go back and back.

28
Got it.

5
What they do in that process, we’ll tell you everything you need to know. We get to change that. But you understand the only way we get to change that is take responsibility for our own life. Not for their lives, not for hers, not for his, not for its, not for the community, not for the state, not for the government, not for the federal, not for the international. Our life, my life.

5
I’ve got to go to work on my life. Trust in exactly the way they went to work on me in boot camp. Now hear me, I’ve got to put myself into boot camp. And I’ve got to get all of the bullshit out of me. So I can suddenly discover what truth means. We don’t even know what the word truth means.

27
Well, truth is offensive.

5
Truth is, it hurts.

1
Truth is something people can’t handle. I mean, when you sit down and you explain to a young whippersnapper, some people come to our conferences and they want to know how search engines work. So you sit down and you explain to them how the Google algorithm works and you show them examples and they go, I don’t want to have to do all of that. Is there an easy way?

1
And you say, no, you can’t. I won’t get too nerdy into it, but you tell them you have to have the most original HTML content, you have to have a canonically compliant website, you have to have the most reviews and the most mobile compliance. There’s four variables and they say canonical. But it’s multiple syllables.

24
And I would have to play.

5
It’s not you have to. It’s it has to be. So I’m just saying that you have to it has to. What you have to do is come face to face and understand how little you actually know. So if you were to take the average human being in these United States today,

5
if you were to take everybody out there on the street who’s burning everything down and have them take a test, I’m not talking about a hard test. I’m talking about a simple test. I’m talking about your A, B, C’s. I’m talking about your 1, 2, 3’s. If you were to put them through that process, the vast majority

5
of them would fail. Absolutely abject failure. And then you’ve got to say, if you don’t So that, what leads you to presume that you can tell me how to live my life?

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Time for boot camp.

20
So my point is, one of the greatest things

5
that anybody could possibly do for America is put everybody into boot camp. Everybody goes to boot camp. You got to have a boot camp on whatever you’re deciding to do. You gotta have a boot camp because that’s where people demonstrate who they are and what they know and what they do and what they don’t and what they’re not willing to do.

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Boot camp. Boot camp.

25
You gotta open them up.

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Tears are weakness leaving the body, as my uncle used to tell me. I think what you’re telling us is mind-altering for some people. I want to respect your time. I had a couple more questions on part one of this interview. I wanted to ask you specifically, on page 67 of your book, you wrote something to me, the reader, to all the readers.

1
You wrote this to us. You said, you did the best you could. It’s time to get on with your life, to build your business in an enlivening way. What does it mean to build your business in an enlivening way?

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What does it mean to enliven? Is that what you’re asking?

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Yes, because it’s a word I don’t hear people use.

3
Well, it means to bring true life to it. In short, when folks come to work, they’re coming to invest their life for a particular period of time to engage in work with the intent of producing a result, it’s going to add value to every single person associated with that work. That means your customer. That means the guy at the desk next door. Means the guy you report to.

3
Means the woman in the accounting department. Means everybody and anybody who’s joined here, come here every day. It’s like a prayer at the beginning of the day. Every day to enliven the experience. Come closer to God. So I’ve been given to say of late, if we’re born in the image of God, and in Genesis it says we are,

5
then it means we’re born to create. God is the Creator. So if we’re born in the image of God, it means we’re born to create. To create what? To create a world fit for God. But what would a world fit for God look like? Well you can begin by reading the Ten Commandments and you suddenly begin to see that we can experience as we do it and after we’ve done it and before we do it that literally brings life to everything

5
I do.

1
Imagine that and then you see what I mean by that. You have given me an enlivened existence where I was able to escape the rat race. So today while we’ve been talking I think my team has probably cut, we have three stores, there’s five stores that are open that cut hair and I don’t have the ability to cut hair. So the barbershop, there’s five stores open we have. So it’s probably 200 people that got their hair cut in the last hour and a half, two

1
hours, about 200 people getting their hair cut.

5
Wait a second, wait a second, Clay. Yeah. That’s not true what you just said.

24
Oh, sure.

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You said I don’t have to do anything. No, hear me. You have to be something.

20
True.

3
So at the heart of what you created is your energy. At the heart of your energy is a love for God. True. At the heart of your love for God is a determination to transform the state of every human being you connect with in whatever way is possible. socially, spiritually, relationally.

3
What an extraordinary thing to possess as Clay Clark possesses it. And what an extraordinary thing for Clay Clark to pursue, to pursue with every bit of energy

5
you’ve got.

1
I appreciate you saying that, and I want you to know you unshackled me, personally. It was a thing where you allowed me to get away from the DJ microphone at these weddings, to get away from the day-to-day operations and the reactivity, to be able to build proactive businesses. So now we can hopefully together mentor millions of people. And you have helped me, and I would love to give you the microphone to share what you’re

1
working on now, because whatever you’re working on now deserves a Harry Caray holy cow.

16
Holy cow!

1
We met in Chicago, so whatever you’re working on now deserves a Chicago Harry Caray holy cow.

23
Holy cow!

1
So tell us, what are you working on now, sir? What are you doing?

5
spelled Y-O-U, university. A university called Radical U. Radical Y-O-U. I want you to imagine awakening the entrepreneur within every human being on the planet. Every human being on capable of studying, capable of working. That’s what we created. So we have created a university,

3
an entrepreneurial development university

20
to take out to the world

5
and to transform the state of entrepreneurship worldwide to a degree that’s never been accomplished before. Our university is five years long. Our university is devoted to what we call

3
the eight fold path.

22
Wow.

16
And every student in our university

5
will discover their dream, their vision, their purpose, their mission, their job, their practice, their business, their enterprise. An evolution of an enterprise from a company of one to a company of 1,000 called Beyond the E-Minute.

5
The evolution of an enterprise from a company of one to a company of 1,000. And here’s the best part. And you can promote this, promote this, promote this, promote this, Clay, until you’re blue in the face. But every person within the sound of your voice needs to understand this, that we’re giving

5
the first year of Radical You away for $10.

1
10 bucks the whole year?

3
10 bucks for the entire year. 52 weeks, 52 video sessions online, right now. And every single person within the sound of my voice who can see my face or see my Panama hat or see your jacket, whatever it is, every single human being, I’m inviting them to join us in Radical You. Those people join us in Radical You, Clay, we’re going to bring folks like you, folks like the other gentleman who just said hurrah, folks like every person you’re going

5
to teach something, and they’re going to teach something, and I’m going to teach you what to teach.

3
But hear me, that’s what we’re working on, five million students within the next three years.

1
And then guess what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen?

7
Apple.

1
Apple, the company, is going to acquire Radical You. Michael, I want to respect your time. I know you’re taking your wife on a great date tonight. Thank you. Thank you so much, my friend. I really do appreciate you.

5
Clay, see you in Oklahoma.

21
Clay Clark is here somewhere. Where’s my buddy Clay?

20
Clay Clark!

14
Clay’s the greatest. I met his goats today, I met his dogs, I met his chickens, I saw his compound. He’s like the greatest guy.

19
I ran from his goats, his chickens, his dogs.

14
So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right? His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing.

1
Okay, Aaron Antis, March 6th and 7th. March 6th and 7th, guess who’s coming to Tulsa, Russia? Ooh, Santa Claus? No, no, that’s March. March 6th and 7th, you’re gonna be joined by Robert Kiyosaki.

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Robert Kiyosaki. Best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, possibly the best-selling or one of the best-selling business authors of all time. And he’s going to be joined with Eric Trump. We’ll be joined by Eric Trump. We got Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki in the same place.

17
In the same place.

1
Aaron, why should everybody show up to hear Robert Kiyosaki? Well, you got billions of dollars of business experience between those two, not to mention many, many, many millions of books have been sold. Many, many millionaires have been made from the books that have been sold by Robert Kiyosaki. I happen to be one of them. I learned from the man.

1
He was the inspiration.

17
That book was the inspiration for me to get the entrepreneurial spirit, as many other

1
people. Now, since you won’t brag on yourself, I will. You’ve sold billions of dollars of houses, am I correct? That is true. And the book that that kick-started it all for you, Rich Dad Ported, the author, the best-selling author of Rich Dad Ported, Robert Kiyosaki, the guy that kick-started your career, he’s gonna be here. He’s gonna be here, I’m bummed. And now Eric Trump, people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees. There’s

1
not 50 employees. The Trump Organization, again, most people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees. And while Donald J. Trump was the 45th President of these United States and soon to be the 47th President of these United States, he needed someone to run the companies for him. And so the man that runs the Trump Organization for Donald J. Trump as he was the 45th President of the United States and now the 47th President of the United States is Eric Trump. So Eric Trump is here to talk about time management, promoting from within, marketing, branding, quality

1
control, sales systems, workflow design, workflow mapping, how to build. I mean, everything that you see, the Trump hotels, the Trump golf courses, all their products, the man who manages billions of dollars of real estate and thousands of employees is here to teach us how to do it. You are talking about one of the

1
greatest brands on the planet from a business standpoint. I mean who else has been able to create a brand like the Trump brand? I mean look at it and this is the man behind the business for the last pretty much since 2015. He’s been the man behind it so you’re talking we’re into nine going into ten years of him running it and we get to tap into that knowledge. That’s going to be amazing. Now, think about this for a second. Would you buy a ticket just to see Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump? Of course you would.

1
But we’re also going to be joined by Sean Baker. This is the best-selling author, the guy who invented the carnivore diet. Dr. Sean Baker has been on Joe Rogan multiple times. He’s going to be joining us. So you’ve got Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling author, rich dad, poor dad, Eric Trump, Sean Baker. The lineup continues to grow. And this is how we do our tickets here at the Thrive Time Show. If you want to

1
get a VIP ticket, you can absolutely do it. It’s $500 for a VIP ticket. We’ve always done it that way. Now if you want to take a general admission ticket, it’s $250 or whatever price you want to pay. And the reason why I do that, and the reason why we do that, is because we want to make our events affordable for everybody. I grew up without money. I totally understand what it’s like to be the tight spot. So if you want to attend, it’s $250 or whatever price you

1
want to pay. That’s how I do it. And it’s $500 for a VIP ticket. Now, we only have limited seating here. The most people we’ve ever had in this building was for the Jim Brewer presentation. Jim Brewer came here. The legendary comedian Jim Brewer came to Tulsa, and we had 419 people that were here. 419 people. And I thought to myself, there’s no more room. I felt kind of bad that a couple people had VIP seats in the men’s restroom Oh, no, I’m just kidding. But I thought so I thought you know what we should probably add on so we’re adding on What we call the upper deck the D or the top shelf. The seats are very close to the presenters

1
But we’re actually building right now We’re adding on to the facility to make room to accommodate another 30 about another 30 attendees or more. So again, if you want to get tickets for this event, all you have to do is go to thrivetimeshow.com. Go to thrivetimeshow.com. When you go to thrivetimeshow.com, you’ll go there,

1
you’ll request a ticket, boom. Or if you want to text me, if you want a little bit faster service, you say, I want you to call me right now. I just texted my number, it’s my cell phone number, my personal cell phone number.

1
We’ll keep that private between you, between you, me, everybody. We’ll keep that private. And anybody, don’t share that with anybody except for everybody. That’s my private cell phone number. It’s 918-851-0102.

1
918-851-0102. I know we have a lot of Spanish-speaking people that attend these conferences, and so to be bilingually sensitive, my cell phone number is 918-851-0102. That is not actually bilingual. That’s just saying one for a one. It’s not the same thing. I think you’re attacking me. Now let’s talk about this. Now what kind of stuff will you learn at the Thrive Time Show workshop?

1
So Aaron, you’ve been to many of these over the past seven, eight years. So let’s talk about it. I’ll tee up the thing and then you tell me what you’re going to learn here. Okay. Okay. You’re going to learn marketing, marketing and branding. What are we going to learn about marketing and branding? Oh yeah. We’re going to dive into, you know, so many people say, oh, you know,

17
I got to get my brand known out there, like the Trump brand.

18
Right?

1
You want to get that brand out there. It’s like, how do I actually make people know what my business is and make it a household name? You’re going to learn some intricacies

17
of how you can do that.

1
You’re going to learn sales. So many people struggle to sell something. This just in, your business will go to hell if you can’t sell. So we’re going to teach you sales. We’re going to teach you search engine optimization, how to come up top in the search engine results.

1
We’re going to teach you how to manage people. Aaron, you have managed, no exaggeration, hundreds of people throughout your career and thousands of contractors. And most people struggle with managing people. Why does everybody have to learn how to manage people?

1
Well, because first of all, you either have great people or you have people who suck. And so it could be a challenge. Learning how to work with a large group of people and get everybody pulling in the same direction can be a challenge.

1
But if you have the right systems, you have the right processes, and you’re really good at selecting great ones, and we have a process we teach about how to find great people. When you start with the people who have a great attitude,

1
they’re teachable, they’re driven, all of those things, then you can get those people all pulling in the same direction. So we’re going to teach you branding, marketing, sales, search engine optimization. We’re going to teach you accounting.

1
We’re going to teach you personal finance, how to manage your finance. We’re going to teach you time management. How do you manage your time? How do you get more done during a typical day? How do you build an organization if you’re not organized?

1
How do you do organization? How do you build an org chart? Everything that you need to know to start and grow a business will be taught during this two-day interactive business workshop. Let me tell you how the format is set up here. Again folks, this is

1
a two-day interactive 15 Think about this folks. It’s two days. Each day it starts at 7 a.m. and it goes until 5 p.m. So from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. two days. It’s a two-day interactive workshop. The way we do it is we do a 30-minute teaching session and then we break for 15 minutes for a question and answer session.

1
So Aaron, what kind of great stuff happens during that 15-minute question and answer session after every teaching session? I actually think it’s the best part about the workshops because here’s what happens. I’ve been to lots of these things over the years. I’ve paid many thousands of dollars to go to them, and you go in there and they talk in vague generalities, and they’re constantly upselling you for something, trying to get you to buy this thing or that thing

1
or this program or this membership. And you don’t, you leave not getting your very specific questions answered about your business or your employees or what you’re doing on your marketing. And what’s awesome about this is we literally answer every single question that any person asks. And it’s very specific to what your business is.

1
And what we do is we allow you as the attendee to write your questions on the whiteboard. And then we, literally, as you mentioned, we answer every single question on the whiteboard. And then we take a 15-minute break to stretch and to make it entertaining when you’re stretching. This is a true story. When you get up and stretch, you’ll be greeted by mariachis. There’s going to probably be alpaca here, llamas, helicopter rides, a coffee bar, a

1
snow cone. I mean, there’s just… You had a crocodile one time. That was pretty interesting. You know, I should write that down. Sorry for that one guy that we lost. The crocodile, we duct taped its face. It was a baby crocodile. Yeah, duct tape around the mouth so it didn’t bite anybody. But it was really cool to pass

1
that thing around. I should do that. We have a small petting zoo that will be assembled. It’s going to be great. And then you’re in the company of hundreds of entrepreneurs. So there’s not a lot of people in America today. In fact, there’s less than 10 million people today, according to U.S. Debt Clock, that identify as being self-employed. So if you have a country with 350 million people, that means you have less than 3% of our population that’s even self-employed. So you only have 3 out of every 100 people in America

1
that are self-employed to begin with, and when Inc. Magazine reports that 96% 86% of businesses fail by default. By default, you have a one out of a thousand chance of succeeding in the game of business. But yet the average client that you and I work with, we can typically double the size. No hyperbole, no exaggeration. I have thousands of testimonials to back this up.

1
We have thousands of testimonials to back it up. But when you work with a home builder, when I work with a business owner, we can typically double the size of the company within 24 months.

16
Yeah.

1
And you say, double? Yeah, there’s businesses that we have tripled. There’s businesses we’ve grown 8x. There’s so many examples. You can see it thrivetimeshow.com. But again, this is the most interactive best business

1
workshop on the planet. This is objectively the highest rated and most reviewed business workshop on the planet. And then you add to that Robert Kiyosaki, the bestselling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. You add to that Eric Trump, the man that runs the Trump Organization,

1
you add to that Sean Baker, now you might say, but Clay, is there more? I need more! Well, okay, Tom Wheelwright is the wealth strategist for Robert Kiyosaki. So people say, Robert Kiyosaki, who’s his financial wealth advisor? Who’s the guy who manages, who’s his wealth strategist? His wealth strategist, Tom Wheelwright, will be here.

1
And you say, Clay, I still, I’m not going to get a ticket unless you give me more. Okay, fine. We’re going to serve you the same meal both days. True story. We cater in food and because, I keep it simple,

1
I literally bring him the same food both days for lunch. It’s Ted Escovedo’s, an incredible Mexican restaurant. That’s going to happen. And Jill Donovan, our good friend, who is the founder of Rustic Cup. She started that company in her home and now

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she sells millions of dollars of apparel and products. That’s rusticcuff.com. And someone says, I want more! This is not enough! Give me more. Okay, I’m not going to mention their names right now because I’m working on it behind the scenes here. But we’ve got one guy who’s given me a verbal to be here. And this is a guy who’s one of the wealthiest people in Oklahoma. And nobody really knows who he is, because he’s built systems that are very utilitarian,

1
that offer a lot of value. He’s made a lot of money in the, it’s the, it’s where you rent, it’s short term, it’s where you’re renting storage spaces. He’s a storage space guy. He owns the, what do you call that? The rental, the, storage space?

1
Storage units. This guy owns storage units, he owns railroad cars, he owns a lot of assets that make money on a daily basis, but they’re not like customer facing. Most people don’t know who owns the mini storage facility, or most people don’t know who owns the warehouse that’s passively making money. Most people don’t know who owns the railroad cars, but this guy, he’s giving me a verbal

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that he will be here. And we just continue to add more and more success stories. So if you’re out there today and you want to change your life, you want to learn how to start and grow a company, go to Thrivetimeshow.com, go there right now, Thrivetimeshow.com, request a ticket for the two-day interactive event. Again, the day here is March 6th and 7th, March 6th and 7th, we just got confirmation,

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Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, he’ll be here, Eric Trump, the man who leads the Trump Organization, it’s going to be a blasty blast. There’s no upsells. Aaron, I could not be more excited about this event. I think it is incredible and there’s somebody out there right now you’re watching and you’re like, but I already signed up for this incredible other program called Smoke Your Way to Thin. You think that’s going to change your life? I promise you this will

1
be ten times better than that. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. Don’t do the Smoke Your Way to Thin conference. That is… I’ve tried it. Don’t do it. Chain smoking is not a viable… I mean, it is life-changing. It is life-changing.

16
If you become a chain smoker, it is life-changing.

1
It’s not the best weight loss program, though. Right. Not really. So if you’re looking to have life-changing results in a way that won’t cause you to have a stoma, get your tickets at Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Aaron Antis, I’m Clay Clark, reminding you and inviting you to come out to the two-day

1
interactive Thrive Time Show workshop right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I promise you, it will be a life-changing experience. I promise you, it will be a life-changing experience. We can’t wait to see you right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 

Transcribed with Cockatoo