Automatic Millionaire | The Path to Becoming An Automatic Millionaire By Learning How to Manage Your Numbers With NY Times Best-Selling Author, David Bach + Join Eric Trump At Clay Clark’s Sept 25-26 Business Conf.

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

(Speaker 7)
I’m Jerry from Jerry’s Landscape. We do irrigation, tree removal, landscaping. We pretty much do it all. I can landscape the heck out of a property. That’s never really been a problem for me. I’ve had a tough time with accounting, with my bookkeeping, but then I came up with this amazing system that has really been a game changer for me.

(Speaker 7)
This side of the dash here, this is all the invoices. This side of the dash is gonna be expenses. Then I’ve got any miscellaneous receipts or anything like that, that goes in the back seat. Then, of course, anything tax related. I don’t even know what half that stuff is. But anything from IRS, that’s gonna go right here on the passenger side floorboard.

(Speaker 7)
I’ve even got a place for customer complaints. Right out here. I’m kidding, actually, it’s not really the best to even open the windows at all.

(Speaker 4)
What if you could decide today? become an automatic millionaire simply by changing just a few daily habits. And the good news is you only have to make the decision one time and then you could be 100 % certain for sure that you would in fact retire as an automatic millionaire. Well, on today’s show, the nine time New York Times bestselling author, Mr. David Bach, joins us to teach you his secrets for becoming an automatic millionaire.

(Speaker 13)
Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men. Eight kids co -created by two different women. Thirteen multi -million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Thrive Time Show.

(Speaker 4)
Yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, ladies and gentlemen, on today’s show we are interviewing a nine -time New York Times best -selling author, who is best known for his Finish Rich book and the Automatic Millionaire series of financial books. He’s just recently released his 20th anniversary edition of his mega seller, Smart Women Finish Rich. David holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California, and throughout his career, he has appeared on the Today Show, CNBC. Fox Business, live with Regis and Kelly, The View, Larry King, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and anywhere on the planet that TVs are sold. Ladies and gentlemen, David has impacted my life in a profound way with this thing he calls the latte effect.

(Speaker 4)
Let’s welcome on, without any further ado, Mr. David Bach.

(Speaker 3)
Welcome on, sir.

(Speaker 25)
Wow, I love it.

(Speaker 3)
Well, it’s great to be on the show with you. Thank you for, I don’t know, just a totally awesome introduction. I love your energy.

(Speaker 4)
David, years ago, my wife and I, we were getting this book called The Automatic Millionaire because I don’t do road trips unless I have an audio book. and then if I listen to the audio book and I like it I buy the physical book. So I picked up the book called The Automatic Millionaire and at the time I had a company called DJ Connection which I later sold but before I sold it we were doing 4 ,000 weddings or corporate events a year and it still exists today DJConnection . com and you said you challenged me You said, you Mr. Clay Clark, you Mr. Listener, you Mr. whoever you are, you have to save at least one hour per day of income regardless of how much money you’re making. And at the time I was making a copious amount of money. Can you talk to us about the importance of beginning to save one hour per day of income regardless of how much money we’re making?

(Speaker 3)
Yeah, I mean, I would love you because honestly, this is what should be taught to you before you get out of like the eighth grade. So let me start by saying this, the average person in America is going to work 90 ,000 hours. That’s a lot of hours, right? So it’s, you know, if you’re and if you’re both working, which many families, you know, both work, right, you could have a family that the two of you combined will work over 200 ,000 hours during your lifetime. So if you just take that math and you go, well, geez, well, so. I guess if people are working so hard, then they must all end up with a lot of money, right?

(Speaker 3)
Because you trade your time for money when you go to work. So are they? And that’s really the core issue. They’re not, right? So one out of two Americans right now, according to the Federal Reserve, can’t get their hands on $400 in case of emergency purposes.

(Speaker 34)
True.

(Speaker 3)
$400, right?

(Speaker 20)
$400, yeah.

(Speaker 3)
So the follow -up book to The Automatic Millionaire was actually a book called Start Late, Finish Rich. When I wrote Start Late Finish Rich, the thing that blew my mind away was that the statistics said that 60 % to 70 % of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. What I started saying to people was, ìLook, hereís the deal. The entire secret to building wealth is that you have to fight for your paycheck and you have to keep the first dollar a day of your income. And what that means, super simple, is you go to work at nine o ‘clock and you work until five. On a typical day, you need to keep whatever you earn the first hour.

(Speaker 3)
So from nine to 10, let’s say you make $20 an hour, or $50 an hour, or $100 an hour. Whatever that first hour of income is, it’s gotta go straight to you. And the only legal way to have it go straight to you, where it doesn’t go to taxes, or social security, or state tax, like I live in New York City, right? I’ve got federal tax, I’ve got state tax, I’ve got city tax, I’ve got social security tax. When I earn a dollar, over 40 cents on the dollar is gone before I can ever see it, right? The only way I can not pay those taxes, and the key word here is legally, is if I take money that first hour day of my income and I put it in a deductible retirement account.

(Speaker 3)
So for someone who’s listening that’s got a job, it’s going to be like a 401k plan. Or if you’re a teacher, it’s going to be a 403b plan. Or if you’re a government worker, it might be a TSA plan. Or if you’re self -employed, like you probably, you know, you were self -employed, right? When you had this DJ connections.

(Speaker 50)
Yep.

(Speaker 3)
It’s a self -employed retirement account. It’s like a SEP IRA account. And, you know, many entrepreneurs don’t even fund these accounts because they don’t even know about them. So the whole concept of pay yourself first one hour day of your income is that if you do that, you’re saving twelve and a half percent of your gross income. And that’s a really good starting number. Now, I got to be honest, I’m starting to try to get Americans to save more than that.

(Speaker 3)
You know, 15 to 20 percent of your gross income is even better. And I taught that in The Automatic Millionaire. Like if you want to get rich faster, it’s 15 to 20 percent. But getting people to focus on one hour a day of your income, I really do think that been a game changer. When I wrote, when I put out The Automatic Millionaire, we launched the book on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and this is back in 2004, and this idea of getting people to think about it in terms of why would you go to work and not keep the first hour a day of your income?

(Speaker 3)
I think it was like a lightbulb moment for people, like obviously it reached you, right? Like, you remembered it and it got other people to kind of go home and think about that and talk about it with their wife and talk about it with their family and make that a goal.

(Speaker 10)
And it’s a great goal.

(Speaker 4)
One thing that, and I mean this in a positive way, so if you don’t like this compliment, if you feel like this is a backhanded compliment, you can feel free to hang up and I’ll know, I’ll pick up on that subtle cue. But you are not Yoda, you know, you’re more of a Broda. I mean, you are like, the way you write, the way you write is like, I feel like it’s my brother from another mother writing on a third grade level that I can understand. You don’t talk in financial jargon. Your books are very easy to read, easy to understand. They’re real page turners.

(Speaker 4)
I mean, they’re very easy to read. And in one of your books, you wrote, you said, the number one financial mistake is not to have your finances on automatic. And I wrote that down in my man journal, man journal, I wrote it down. And I wrote it down, I go, Automatic. I mean, everything about my company, DJ Connection, was automatic. Every DJ had a checklist for their shows.

(Speaker 4)
After the wedding, we sent the bride a survey. Based on their survey, we determined how much the DJ got paid. And so if a DJ got a bad review, he made very little money. If he got a great review, he made a lot of money. And everything in my life’s automatic. Checklists, systems, processes.

(Speaker 4)
Why aren’t my finances automatic? Can you explain to our listeners what it means to have? Help us. Help us get our finances on automatic.

(Speaker 3)
Yeah, well, I mean, here’s why it needs to be automatic. I mean, I learned this by being a financial advisor, working with people in the real world. What I saw is that when someone says, you know, I’m disciplined, David, I’m going to write a check. I’ll bring you the money every month to save. Nobody did it. Right.

(Speaker 3)
Like they might they might do it for two months. The record was six. So what I what I saw firsthand was the only way people will will really save money for whatever it is, retirement, buying a home, college savings, wanting to start a new business. The only way people are successful at investing and saving is when they save automatically and when they have the money moved automatically. So the automatic millionaire was really about simple idea and nothing’s changed because it’s timeless principles. First of all, don’t try to have a budget, because budgets suck.

(Speaker 3)
People have been told for decades and generations, you need a budget. If budgets worked, then everybody would be wealthy. But you go on a budget, they’re totally frustrated, couples fight over their budgets all the time. What works is saving money automatically. So I taught him the automatic millionaire throw the budget out. I learned my clients forget the budget.

(Speaker 3)
Let’s just make sure you’re taking 10 percent off the top or 20 percent off the top. Let’s move this money automatically. Every time money comes in, let’s move it automatically into the places it needs to go. And that’s kind of the next part of automation, is where does the money need to go? And when you get into real financial planning, if you were to simplify it, which is what I live to do, is to make it simple, because the problem with money is people make it too complicated. If you were to simplify money, there’s like a handful of things that you need to make automatic.

(Speaker 3)
You need your bills made automatic. You need your emergency account made automatic. You need your retirement account made automatic.

(Speaker 4)
And then you need a dream account made automatic. Oh, yes. David, I want to put this all in the show notes. I want to end my passive aggressive attempt to book you on the show again. I mean, you are so good. You’re preaching this automatic, automatic.

(Speaker 4)
automatic. Somebody out there is going, I want to make it automatic. What do I do?

(Speaker 10)
What do I do, David? And here’s the thing that’s incredible is like, this used to be so hard.

(Speaker 3)
This didn’t used to be easy to do, right? Like 20 years ago, I got in this business in 1993. I didn’t think about this for a second. So, you know, back in the day, if you would come into my office, and I was at Morgan Stanley, and I wanted to just automate a savings account for you, I’d have to have you fill out like six pieces of paperwork. It was a huge process, right? Today, when somebody wants to do anything automated, Now with technology, you can literally open up your iPhone, go click, click, click.

(Speaker 3)
Most financial service companies today are at a point where you can have your financial life, in some cases, automated in less than 10 minutes. You can open up a savings account in less than 10 minutes online. You can have an automated retirement account with a diversified portfolio in less than 10 minutes. Things have been made really simple. And by the way, that simplicity is also making it so that now more and more people are saving money automatically.

(Speaker 4)
There are now a lot of people who are building real wealth because of automated savings. And by the way, back in 1993, a lot of our listeners probably couldn’t focus on their finances because they were listening to Wump. There it is. And now people have the ability to focus. That song was hot back in 1993. Just a little DJ fun factoid for you.

(Speaker 4)
I want to ask you this because I know there’s somebody out there who’s a big fan of Marie And I saw you on an interview with her where you were quoted as having written in the past, you wrote, we need to start with our values because your values can determine how hard you are willing to work to achieve your financial goals. How much money you currently spend and how much money you will actually need for retirement.

(Speaker 49)
Could you talk to us about the importance of knowing our financial values?

(Speaker 10)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, I love Marie Forleo, and I love that you watched that video.

(Speaker 3)
It’s a great video.

(Speaker 4)
People can go and find that, David Bach, Marie Forleo.

(Speaker 3)
I’ll put a link to it on the show notes. Yeah, because that was a great interview, and I love her, and she’s here in New York City also, and we’ve become good friends. And I’ve known Marie for over 10 years, and I think what I’ve always talked about since the beginning of my career is that All financial planning is personal, but it should be based off your values. If you can look at what’s really most important to you, why do you want money? Instead of just saying like, oh, I want a million dollars. What is it that you want?

(Speaker 10)
Why do you want money? Well, geez, I want to be financially free.

(Speaker 3)
Well, what does that mean to you? You know, I’d like to go start a new business, or I’d like to take my family to Hawaii, or I want to make sure that I have security. I want to be able to give back to my community. If you can drill down deeper into what your values are, I teach in some of my first books, like Smart Women Finish Rich, which we just put out as a 20 -year anniversary edition. That was my first book. Smart Women Finish Rich starts by having you look at what your values are.

(Speaker 3)
Once you’re clear on your values, you make your financial goals based off of those, and And then you do all your financial planning around it.

(Speaker 4)
I have a quick confession real quick because this might get weird.

(Speaker 42)
Chuck, this might get weird for the listeners out there.

(Speaker 4)
Sometimes it does. I’m sorry, Dave. I know we’re just meeting each other.

(Speaker 48)
I feel like I’ve known you forever because I’ve listened to every interview you’ve ever done.

(Speaker 4)
We go way back. Here’s the deal. I actually read smart women finish rich in preparation for today’s show and We had the 20th anniversary and it was like it was it wasn’t you know, it wasn’t super woo -woo I mean, you didn’t tell me clay you make sure you get estrogen injections. I mean, it wasn’t super weird I mean But the thing is there’s so many women in my in my case and my family my wife and I we were we have five kids and we work together on everything we work together in every business and I’m offense, my wife’s defense and the service we offer or the product we offer for any company is the special teams. I’m the offense, I do the marketing, the advertising, that kind of the sales.

(Speaker 4)
And my wife does the accounting, the financial planning. And when I picked up the book, that’s what my wife does. Vanessa does the financial planning for our family. And I think there’s a lot of women out there who have their head down, and they assume that their husband is doing the financial planning. They assume that they’re doing something. They go through a divorce.

(Speaker 4)
They go through a medical issue. Their husband passes away. Something terrible happens. And then they discover that their husband has not been actually saving money.

(Speaker 3)
Can you talk to the ladies out there, all the single ladies, all the married ladies, all the sophisticated mamas out there, who are finding themselves totally unaware of what’s going on financially and why they should pick up Smart Women Finish Rich? Yeah, well, I mean, absolutely. So Smart Women Finish Rich was the first book that I wrote, and I’m glad that you read it because, you know, I give that book to a lot of my guy friends back when I wrote it, and it’s very helpful, I think. The thing for women to know is this, if you’re in a marriage right now and you have a good marriage. That’s great. But what you need to know is you’re going to outlive your husband.

(Speaker 3)
Oh, so so so negative. So I’m gonna I’m gonna like cut to the chase here because there’s really three core issues that women face. In most cases, women outlive their husbands. 80 % of women die widowed, and 80 % of men die married. So the average age of widowhood when I wrote the book originally was 56. Today, it’s gone up, it’s 59.

(Speaker 3)
That’s still really young. And people go, how is that possible? Because women tend to marry men that are older. Men pass away first. So the first thing you need to know is, I always tell ladies, I don’t care if you marry the local bank president. At some point, there’s a very good chance you’ll be the one in charge of the money.

(Speaker 3)
The time to be in charge of not just paying the bills, but knowing where all the money is, is today. So knowing where’s the will, where’s the life insurance, do we have life insurance, where are the retirement accounts, are we putting enough away in our retirement accounts, are the beneficiaries up to date. You know, where’s the college savings plan? All these things. There’s like 17 things I list in the book that there’s like a little, what I call a finish rich quiz. And you go through all these questions to take a look at, like, what do you know or what don’t you know since you can get on track with it?

(Speaker 3)
But the thing women need to know is you’re going to be in charge of the money at some point, so it’s the best time to be in charge of the money now. Second thing to know is you’re going to live longer in retirement than most men do. Women are often retired 5, 10, 15, 20, some cases 30 years longer than their husbands. So you need more money set aside for retirement. And the third thing you need to know is that a lot of women are earning less than men, which women know this, but the reasons why haven’t changed a lot over 20 years. One is, first of all, they’re not paid equally in many cases, but then they take time off from work to be full -time moms, which is a full -time job.

(Speaker 3)
And on average, women take somewhere between seven to 11 years off from work and prime earning years. So when they have children and I don’t know, it doesn’t sound like your wife did this, but when a lot of women have children, that becomes their full time job. And therefore, they’re walking away from work or they’re having to leave work because of their situation in their prime earning years, which impacts their income and impacts how much money they have in savings. And it’s not just in savings. It’s in Social Security and it’s in pension plans. and women have less money in social security and pension plans.

(Speaker 3)
So what Smart Women Finish Rich was all about was empowering women to wake up to what it is you specifically need to do to fix this, what’s called a retirement gap. How do you protect yourself as a woman? My mission, my mantra for 20 some years has been, I don’t care if you’re a woman, I don’t care if you’re married, single, widowed, divorced, you have to be the one in charge of your financial life. And, you know, I learned about money from my grandmother, Rose Bach. She was a woman who started with nothing, without a college education. She became a self -made millionaire.

(Speaker 3)
She was broke at 30. She learned how to do this, and she passed the lessons forward. She taught my father how to do it, myself, my sister. And really, when I started teaching seminars for women and money back in 1994, it was in an effort to basically Pass along these lessons from my grandmother because I had seen so many women hurt through widowhood and divorce Financially and I just wanted to do something about it. And you know, the crazy thing is here. I’m tear 24 years later I smart women finish Richard sold a million copies It’s one of the most popular books for women and money that’s ever been out and when I’m psyched that you just read it because when I went to go update it I The message was timeless.

(Speaker 3)
I just had to update things like the tax rules and the different retirement accounts that are available and the different financial service companies, but the message is timeless and it’s timely.

(Speaker 4)
I think more women today are waking up to the fact that if you want to be in charge of your life, be in charge of your money. David, just for the listeners out there who listen to our show regularly, I want to share this with you. When I was building DJ Connection, my wife and I, we got married when we were 20 years old. We started our company. Everyone kept saying, when’s the baby due? We weren’t pregnant.

(Speaker 4)
We just got married early. We went to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We started DJ Connection. We decided, you know what, we want to have five kids. We want to be married for a few years.

(Speaker 3)
And so we ended up having, we were married about four years, and then we had five kids under the age of seven.

(Speaker 36)
Boom, boom, boom, and then twins at one time.

(Speaker 4)
Boom, boom. And so my wife did Peace out. She did leave. She did exit the daily operations of the company. But every week she would look at our finances and she would say, baby. Are you saving some money?

(Speaker 4)
And I would say, because I’m the spender in the family, David. I’d go, baby, I just want to buy a little bit of pinion wood, just a little bit of nice limestone rocks for my backyard.

(Speaker 47)
I’m the guy who always wants to buy one more accoutrement, one more piece of decor.

(Speaker 4)
You know what I mean? I’m the guy who likes to buy speakers, new microphones. I’m kind of an audiophile. But my wife would always rein it in and say, this is how much you can spend this week. And when she first started presenting this to me about year two of our marriage, I thought, it’s me. She hates me. I thought that because my wife would tell me, you have definitely exceeded your $1 ,000 per week discretionary spending, you know, budget or whatever.

(Speaker 4)
And so next week you can spend $200. And I’m like, oh, you’re unbelievable. Why do you hate my dreams? But I think there’s somebody out there in the family. Talk to the couples out there. Maybe the husband’s the one who’s locking down the automatic savings.

(Speaker 4)
Maybe it’s the wife who’s doing it.

(Speaker 3)
Can you talk about why the person who’s being financially prudent and who sets up The automatic millionaire process is not actually the enemy, but they’re actually the hero.

(Speaker 4)
Okay, so let me ask you, because this happened to you, are you glad that she did this to you?

(Speaker 3)
Yes, yes, but I was so pissed consistently. I thought she hated me every week, but then I was happy the next week. So let’s talk about you, because you’re a living, breathing, example of this. When did you turn the corner and realize, you know what?

(Speaker 10)
Actually, this was a pretty good idea.

(Speaker 4)
I’m glad we did this. A little confession. I know you’re not a priest, but you could be the financial coaching priest for people out there. I’ve been married 17 years. I’m 37.

(Speaker 3)
And I think when I turned 27, I finally said thank you, because I’m a horrible person. Well, you know, it’s interesting, right? Because it’s seven years. So I don’t I think what it is, is that here’s the truth about saving and investing and doing these things really right. You don’t notice the impact, the positive impact always right away. You might notice the pain at first, right?

(Speaker 3)
Like, oh, I don’t have the money. I’m not being allowed to go out like my I’ll lose my grandmother box. She realized at 30 she was broke, living paycheck to paycheck and was never going to be able to get ahead unless she changed things in her life. And so she started saving 50 cents a month. a week, 50 cents out of her paycheck. 50 cents out of my grandfather’s paycheck.

(Speaker 3)
In order to do that, she had to go, she worked at Gimbel’s department store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and she had to brown bag her lunch. And when she went to Gimbel’s with her brown bag of lunch, and her girlfriends would go out to lunch, they would tease her and be like, oh, Rose, you’re so cheap. And she’d say, you know what, I’ve made a decision, I’m gonna start saving money, because I want to retire down to the beach at some point. And they laughed at her. Well, you know, later on in life, she wasn’t spending the winters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. and where it’s freezing.

(Speaker 3)
She was at the beach in Laguna Beach, California. And you know, but that took four, that took like four decades, right? So where I go back to for you is like seven years, right? Like it makes sense to me that you say, well, in seven years, I started going, wow, you know, this is pretty good because what happens is over time that, you know, you wait for some people, they’re in debt, but they’ve got two, three years later, all of a sudden they’re, they’re out of debt. If you, if you’re automatically paying your debt down early and I teach you in the automatic millionaire book, how to do that, but all of a sudden your debt’s gone. or all of a sudden you’re like wow, you know I never had any emergency money set aside and now I do or you turn around seven years later And this is what happens I get people stopping me on the street and in the airports and sending me emails Seven years later you turn around and I can people come up to me like David I have I have a hundred thousand dollars in savings now or I have I have a quarter of a million dollars now or I’ve got somebody just put on Amazon the other day that, you know, the latte factor they found they now own three homes and they were a renter.

(Speaker 3)
Well, they didn’t go from stopping drinking coffee to owning three homes in 30 days. What happened was they read The Automatic Millionaire in 2004 and we’re sitting here in 2018. And so over 14 years of doing all this, their whole life is completely different. So what I would say to somebody, you know, back to your question is that someone’s like really trying to get your financial act together, right?

(Speaker 26)
Instead of fighting it, go with it.

(Speaker 3)
Go with it. Cause here’s the thing you’re going to get, you’re going to be older, right? You’re going to blink your eyes and 10 years are going to go by and you’re either going to be 10 years older and still broke, or you could be 10 years older and in much better financial shape. And I, you know, one of my things in the book I say is that, um, Wealth isn’t built in days, it’s built in decades. And most people who are a lot of times, I mean, you know, you’re in the podcast world, right? People so often it’s all about this whole get rich quick scheme.

(Speaker 3)
Like, you know, I got I got this thing for you and this is opportunity. And, you know, I don’t know anybody who’s who’s gotten rich quick.

(Speaker 4)
I know a whole lot of people who have spent their whole life trying to get rich quick and they just they stay broke fast. It takes longer to get rich quick.

(Speaker 3)
Actually, if you look at the math there, it’s it takes so much longer. And the weird thing is, like, you know, the compound interest charts that you see in these books where they show you like, hey, You saved $5 a day or $10 a day and you invested it. it could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or it could be worth millions. It all comes true.

(Speaker 4)
It all works. I knew this would happen because I have like 31 questions prepared for you. I’ve probably gone through seven of them so far. And you are like the world’s number one financial coach. If I had to give an elevator pitch, David Bach, world’s number one financial coach. And people listen to the show, they go, Clay’s not that smart.

(Speaker 4)
He took algebra three times and his ACT three times, but he’s kind of funny. So we listen. So I want to break down three notable quotables. And then I want to tell people about the most current project you’re working on. And I want to allow time for you to share with the listeners your most recent project and why they should check it out here. You have said in the past, people basically inflate in their mind how much money they actually make.

(Speaker 4)
And they almost universally underestimate what they actually spend.

(Speaker 10)
What do you mean by this?

(Speaker 3)
All the time. So someone if you’re with a buddy and your buddy’s like, yeah, I make 100 grand a year.

(Speaker 46)
100 grand a year.

(Speaker 3)
Okay. And then you open up the tax returns, like because this is the thing about being a financial boss, you actually get to see the truth, right?

(Speaker 21)
So someone says to you, I make 100 grand a year.

(Speaker 3)
Boom. And then you open it up and you really look at the tax returns. No, they don’t. They make $85 ,000 a year. They rounded it up, right? Nobody says, oh, I make $83 ,000 a year.

(Speaker 3)
They go, I make $85 ,000 or I make $90 ,000. People round up what they make. They tell other people and they tell themselves, I’m actually making more. So if someone’s making $85 ,000, they’ll say to people, they’re making $100 ,000. OK, that’s number one. Number two is that then people, when you ask people, how much do you spend?

(Speaker 10)
Because I always would do this.

(Speaker 4)
How much do you think you spend a month? Very little at all. I absolutely always am very conservative. I never overspend.

(Speaker 3)
I’m huge. They give you their number, right? I’m spending, I think, you know, we probably, and people sort of know, right? They go, I think we’re spending, let’s say, 7 ,000 a month. I’m just giving you a random number, OK? And then again, I’ll go into the math.

(Speaker 3)
And if they said they’re spending 7 ,000 a month, once I go into the real numbers, they’re not, they’re usually spending eight or 9 ,000 a month. It’s always more. So what happens is if it’s just, if it’s just off by 10%, if a person inflates in their mind what they’re making by 10 % and then they spend 10 % more than they think they are, There’s a 20 % difference there, right? But this is why people go, I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. I’m working so hard and I’m making good money and I’m still broke. One of the things that’s often wrong for people is that they’re not telling the truth to themselves about what they really make. And here’s the other thing I’ll say there.

(Speaker 3)
People take their gross number, right?

(Speaker 10)
So I make $100 ,000 a year.

(Speaker 3)
Well, no, you don’t. After taxes, you make fifty five thousand. I moved to I moved to Latvia. I have expatriated my money.

(Speaker 4)
I don’t want to pay taxes.

(Speaker 30)
I am in some trouble with the I .

(Speaker 4)
S.

(Speaker 3)
right now. But OK, you’re right. So, I mean, that’s that’s that’s one right there. And I think Yeah, money’s funny because you made the point about algebra and geometry. By the way, I hated those classes. I always tell people, you know, the good thing about money is it’s super basic math.

(Speaker 3)
And like if you can take a number 10 and subtract one and realize it’s nine, you know all you need to know about money. That’s it. Like you make $10 and you save a buck, you’re in pretty decent shape, much better than most people. And they go, what? Like, yeah, that’s a good place to start. You make a hundred bucks, you save $10.

(Speaker 43)
Can you figure that out?

(Speaker 10)
Yeah.

(Speaker 45)
Okay.

(Speaker 4)
Then good. Start there. You know, I want to respect your time and I want to ask you two more questions here. The American way. The more we make, the more we spend. And if we’re not careful, the more we owe.

(Speaker 4)
Who said that? David Bach. You said the American way. The more we make, the more we spend. And if we’re not careful, the more we owe. I circled that.

(Speaker 4)
I highlighted that. I wrote that down. I thought about embroidering it on my face. I thought that might be kind of intense, but I decided not to.

(Speaker 3)
But I mean, talk to me about that, the American way. Why is it so screwed up by default? Well, I mean, we created the concept of a consumer society, right? So the American dream is to have a lot of stuff. And it’s never been easier to market to us to have more stuff, right? So you’re on your phone and now it’s an Instagram ad.

(Speaker 3)
Click, click, click, buy something. It’s never been easier to spend money than it is today. Literally, it’s never been easier. You can just click and buy. And so everything around us, it used to be we were bombarded by tens of thousands of messages a year and now we’re bombarded by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of messages a year to spend more money. And I went on this tirade the other day on, where was I?

(Speaker 3)
I don’t know, CNBC. It might have been Yahoo. I can’t even track. I’ve done so many interviews lately. But it was a tirade about the insanity of buying new cars every three years. And the American way, the American system, the American marketing machine has us programmed to buy new cars every three years.

(Speaker 3)
It has this program that if we come into any money, we should buy a new car. It has this program that if we get a tax refund, it’s time for a new car. And so Americans go out and they buy new cars and they borrow the money, and there’s no worse place to put your money than into a brand new car. And yet, there’s like $1 .5 trillion now in car loans. We have more money in car loans than credit card loans and student loans. And a lot of those loans, People, they just keep going out and you buy a new car, you buy a $50 ,000 new car, and you’ve been focused on the monthly payment because that’s how they marketed it to you.

(Speaker 3)
And you drive that car off the lot and that car has gone down in value by $10 ,000, $15 ,000 the moment you drive it off the lot. You borrowed money to buy an asset that immediately goes down in value. It’s not an asset, it’s a liability. So the whole key to really building wealth in America is this. You can either be somebody who spends money, and you can be the consumer, or you can be somebody who owns things. Owners get rich, right?

(Speaker 3)
So you can go to Starbucks and have a coffee and spend five bucks, or if you’re gonna not give that up, then at least own Starbucks stock.

(Speaker 4)
Right? Because if you did, you could have made a forfeit. To quote Kanye West, he had a meeting here with Mr. Donald Trump and they shared their dragon energy together.

(Speaker 3)
And Mr. Kanye West, he said, it’s important for us to own lands and not brands.

(Speaker 4)
Thank you. I missed that part of the interview.

(Speaker 10)
Yeah, you got to watch it. You got to watch it the fifth time.

(Speaker 4)
I just heard about the Superman hat. I was like, I didn’t know. When you watch it the fifth time, if you stare at the picture long enough, you will find the notable quotable. I want to ask you this here. You said in one of your books, and again, I’ve got highlights everywhere, and I add it into a big doc that I look at. It says, the truth about business is that it’s normally very tough.

(Speaker 4)
It’s very rare that you will start something and succeed right away. And if you do succeed, you might not make a lot of money. Most businesses take at least two or three years to show profits.

(Speaker 3)
In my mind, you’re America’s number one financial coach. Why did you say that? Well, I mean, it’s the truth, right? You know a lot of entrepreneurs that make money their first couple of years in business? No. I mean, I know entrepreneurs have been in business, unfortunately, five, six, seven, eight years, and they still haven’t made any money.

(Speaker 3)
What they’re hoping is that as their top line grows, they’re going to turn around and sell the business, and that’s where their money’s going to come from. In fact, the entrepreneur fantasy is, I’m going to build a business, and I’m going to sell it, and then that’s how I’ll have money to retire. Today, with all these billion -dollar unicorn businesses, it seems like they’re going to easy, but that’s the small, small percentage. In fact, most businesses don’t do a million dollars a year in revenue. I think it’s less than 5 % of businesses do more than a million.

(Speaker 3)
I might have that wrong. I have to double check, but it looks like less than 5 % of businesses do over a million dollars a year in revenue. I was in a group called Entrepreneur’s Organization for like 16, 17 years. It’s one of the leading entrepreneur organizations, and you had to do a million dollars in revenue to be in the organization. You had to be the founder of the company. And that was like, you know, that line in the sand that you had to do a million dollars more weeds out most entrepreneurs.

(Speaker 3)
So most entrepreneurs don’t have big businesses and many entrepreneurs, you know, they’re constantly putting their money back in the business to grow and they’re not taking money out for themselves. Or what they’ve been trained to do by their accountants is run all their expenses through their business. And when they do that, they get to the end of the year and then they have no profit. And then if they have no profit, what it really means is they actually don’t have any money. And you know, I do, I like that sound you just made. I’ll do that from stage in front of entrepreneurs where I’ll diagram what that looks like.

(Speaker 3)
I’ll literally do the math.

(Speaker 4)
And they told you to run all these expenses through and now you got to the end of the year and you’re at zero and they go, this is great. You paid no taxes.

(Speaker 44)
And then I go, so where’s your money?

(Speaker 4)
Oh, the thing is, you know, there’s a sound effect that really typifies, explains what you just said. That’s how we feel. That’s how we feel. A lot of accountants are coaching us to be poor. But you’re coaching your clients, your listeners, your nation to be successful. And I would like for you to share with the listeners, what is the most recent project you’re working on right now?

(Speaker 4)
Because I’m an absolute homer for you. And not because I’m delusional, not because I’m delirious, but because I’m serious about success. And you have blessed me profoundly. And I have only paid you in my lifetime $80.

(Speaker 3)
that I know of.

(Speaker 4)
I purchased four of your books, because I’m a bad person. I need to pay you more. Well, and you know, really, if you bought eight out of the books, it means that I’ve made about probably $250 in royalties, right? Look at Amelius. I’m going to set up a PayPal GoFundMe account for you. We’ll see if we can support David Bach, America’s number one financial coach.

(Speaker 10)
Seriously, you’ve helped me so much, brother. I mean it. And I just want the listeners to know what you’re working on right now, because they need to go check it out. Hey, well I’m super grateful to you. This has been really fun and I would love to do a show with you again. So this was a blast.

(Speaker 10)
I enjoyed it. First of all, come visit me over at my website.

(Speaker 33)
Go to davidbach .

(Speaker 3)
com and you can join our newsletter which is free and about every two weeks I send out ideas and tidbits that can help you live and finish rich for the rest of your life. So that’s davidbach . com. The new book is Smart Women Finish Rich. It just came out about two weeks ago. It’s in stores now.

(Speaker 3)
It’s updated 20 year anniversary edition. We also brought an updated edition of Smart Couples Finish Rich. That’s a brand new updated book and it’s in stores now. It’s all on my website. Automatic Millionaire has been updated. So three of my books we’ve updated in the last 18 months, all brand new, available for you.

(Speaker 3)
Also, from an entrepreneur standpoint, I’m a co -founder of a financial service company. The name of it is AE Wealth Management. And we have financial voters all over the country. And so that’s been my entrepreneur passion project the last three years. We’re the second fastest growing R . I .

(Speaker 3)
A. in America according to Investment News. And we’re really growing fast and having a ton of fun doing that helping retirees all across America. And then the last thing is I am working on finishing My next book which I’ll come back and talk to you about which is coming out May 7th 2019 Yes, it is called the latte factor and it is a parable It’s like a who moved my cheese for personal finance that for written for personal finance who probably normally would never read a financial book.

(Speaker 4)
I’ve put my best wisdom simple nuggets into a little story that you can read in like less than an hour.

(Speaker 43)
And hopefully that’s a book that my dream is it will translate all over the world and will spread the message of these simple ideas that you know pay yourself first.

(Speaker 4)
find your latte factor, save money automatically, but we’ll spread it in a way that especially young people will begin to realize that you don’t need to be rich to live rich. That’s really my next big push. I want to sneak in a bonus question that you can hang up here. Yeah. Why? Because you are so successful.

(Speaker 4)
You’ve been a nine times New York Times bestselling author. You’ve been on Oprah. You’ve been on The View. And by the way, you didn’t go on Oprah to confess something. A lot of people go on to Oprah.

(Speaker 11)
You go on Oprah the first time because you have a new book.

(Speaker 4)
The second time to confess. You’ve been on Regis and Kelly. You’ve been on Larry King. Go ahead, Gala. You’ve been on The Today Show, CNBC, Fox Business. I mean, you are the who’s who.

(Speaker 3)
You are the financial coach for America. Why are you so passionate about helping the listener listening right now. Not the listeners, but the specific person listening right now. Why do you care so much about their financial future? It’s such a good question that guy be very I’ll just be like totally open -hearted and honest with you at this very moment Cuz I’m at a raw point. There’s been a long day I’ve had a computer crash and I’ve had like four interviews and then I’ve rewritten the copy the actual copy that’s gonna go on Amazon For this new book the latte factor.

(Speaker 3)
We’ve been rewriting the copy for three weeks. Hopefully this is not your worst interview of the day And the funny thing is, as I basically looked at this document, you know, 45 minutes ago before I got on this interview with you, and I thought to myself, why am I still torturing myself with this work? And the answer is, well, I don’t know what the, it’s like a disease, right? I just deeply still care about what I teach. I love talking to people like you before we did the interview and finding out I wrote a little book and that message somehow reached you and it helped change your life.

(Speaker 3)
And I still absolutely positively love that feeling that I get from knowing that I’m making an impact with my life. And for whatever reason, I think God put me here with this gift. And this is like my gift. And I keep saying to God, like, am I supposed to keep doing this? And here’s the funny thing, like the latte, like I just watched his interview with Tim Ferriss. And I remember when Tim Ferriss reached out to me before he put out his first book.

(Speaker 3)
And I was watching this interview with Tim Ferriss. And he was talking about, you know, how does he choose the things he works on. He said, when I go to bed and I’m thinking about something and I wake up and I’m still thinking about it, a lot of times I know that’s something I have to work on. I’ll take The Latte Factor as an example, this book I’m working on finishing right now. I’ve had that voice in me for 14 years. In 2004, I wanted to do that book after The Automatic Millionaire, and for 10 years, Random House, who was my publisher, I would bring it up every year, I want to do this book, and they’d go, no, no, no, do a different book, right?

(Speaker 3)
And so finally, I said, you know what? I’m going to go write this book, and then I’m going to go sell it to someone else if they don’t want to buy it. And literally, like this book, I went out first time, wrote the book, designed it exactly how I want it, and it’s going to come out with Simon & Schuster.

(Speaker 10)
And so, you know, 14 years, there was that voice inside me that just said, you have to go do this book.

(Speaker 4)
You have to get this message out.

(Speaker 3)
And I don’t think I’m unique in that way, right? That’s the way entrepreneurs are. There’s always something, you know, I think when you’re called to do something. Vocation, yep.

(Speaker 10)
It’s your, you know, your call from a higher power.

(Speaker 4)
Paulo Coelho calls it your personal legend.

(Speaker 3)
And you know, I love if you haven’t read if you haven’t read read The Alchemist, everybody should go read The Alchemist. It’s like the greatest book ever. I’ve heard that on the show, and it’s Alchemist. Yeah, The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho. And, yeah, I went out and met with Paulo Coelho in Geneva, because he’s like my idol in terms of authors.

(Speaker 3)
He’s sold like 150 million books, and his stories have translated all over the world. And we were out having dinner, and then we were out having a lot of drinks.

(Speaker 10)
And I think it was around two in the morning, and Paulo turned to me and said, What is the book that you haven’t written that you need to write?

(Speaker 3)
And I start telling him about the Latte Factor.

(Speaker 4)
I go, Paulo, I want to write this book that will translate all over the world and spread this message to more people. And he looks at me and he goes, well, then, David, you must write that book. So that was 2012. So, you know, it’s gonna come out, it’s gonna come out in May 7th, 2019. I have a Bible verse I want to give you that you’d probably don’t want from me, because I’m certainly not a biblical prophet, but Colossians 3 23 24 to me explains the career of David Bach. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward.

(Speaker 4)
It is the Lord Christ you are serving. David, thank you for serving. Thank you for helping.

(Speaker 42)
I appreciate you so much.

(Speaker 4)
And we’d like to end the show with a boom, which stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum.

(Speaker 5)
And so we’d like to count it down.

(Speaker 39)
Shep, are you ready to count it down?

(Speaker 28)
Let’s do it.

(Speaker 4)
David, are you ready to bring the boom here?

(Speaker 38)
Yeah, boom, man. I love it.

(Speaker 14)
Here we go. Here we go. Three, two, one. Boom.

(Speaker 28)
what you need to know, how you need to do it.

(Speaker 14)
It’s fun. It’s an intense experience.

(Speaker 3)
You absolutely have to do it. It’s amazing. It gives clarity to the things that are maybe a little bit vague as far as understanding. You come away from the conference knowing exactly what you need to do. audio masterclass on guaranteed success, why you must know and complete your daily KPIs or your dream will die. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Clay Clark on the mic.

(Speaker 3)
He is the former U . S. SBA Entrepreneur of the Year, founder of six multimillion dollar companies, a Forbes contributor and author of 13 books and host of the six times iTunes chart topping album. Podcast fine is going to be sharing so many value bombs today. Just take my word for it You are not gonna want to miss any of them and we’ll dive right in with clay as soon as we get back from thinking our sponsors Looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104 % per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full -time minimum wage employee? Schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark at Thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 3)
com slash fire. Thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 34)
com slash fire.

(Speaker 3)
Start building an army of loyal affiliates and brand ambassadors who constantly promote your products today. The step -by -step is waiting for you on my buddy Russell Brunson’s new podcast miniseries, Traffic Secrets. Open your podcast app and subscribe to Traffic Secrets now or visit TrafficSecretsPodcast .

(Speaker 4)
com.

(Speaker 3)
Clay, say what’s up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don’t know. Fire Nation, what is going on?

(Speaker 4)
I hope you’re having a great start to your day or a great day. And fun fact is I wear the same thing every single day. Paint us a picture. What does that look like?

(Speaker 3)
Forever I used to wear a red tie with a white shirt and a blue suit and I had a certain economic goal that once I hit a certain goal level I would begin to never wear that again and so now I wear and one basketball shorts which you too can buy for about 15 bucks. I wear a pair of Yeezys that clients, whenever they hit their financial goals, I have a will work for Yeezys program where people mail me Yeezys as a thank you gift, so I wear Yeezys. I wear a hat that says Boom on it, and I have a jersey that says Boom on it. It’s a custom jersey, and on the back it has my wife’s name on it, Vanessa, and the number 99, because that’s when I graduated from high school. Amazing. I’m actually a 98 high school grad, so we’re right back to back, brother.

(Speaker 3)
I definitely love this. And Fire Nation, as you know from my great introduction of Clay, we’re gonna be talking all about guaranteed success. Why you must know and complete your daily KPIs, or your dream will die. A little dramatic, but true.

(Speaker 4)
And Clay, you’ve been on Entrepreneurs On Fire before, and every single time you have just brought so much energy, so much value, that of course we’re bringing you back on again, because listen, you’re the founder of several multi -million dollar businesses. You are a business coach to over 160 clients who have a combined value that now exceeds $2 billion. Why, I must ask you, why do your clients grow on the average of 104 % a year when Inc. Magazine shows that 96 % of small businesses will fail within 10 years. First off, for your listeners out there who are smart and discerning people, if you go to Thrivetimeshow . com and you click on the testimonials button, you can see these people and hear their stories.

(Speaker 4)
But what I do is, if you’re going to make, let’s say, an airplane or a building, you probably want to use a blueprint. You probably want to use a proven plan. If you want to make a recipe that actually tastes good, you want to use evidence. a smoothie that tastes good, you want to use a recipe. That’s how it works. And what happens is a lot of business owners, for whatever reason, they don’t really either know that a blueprint already exists for the building they want to build or the company they want to build.

(Speaker 4)
They don’t know a blueprint already exists for the automobile they want to create. And they don’t know a recipe exists for the food they want to make. And therefore, they’re working by guesswork. And I have a proven plan that I create for each and every client. And because our program is month to month, it really is incumbent upon me to make sure that it works for my benefit and for their benefit. I don’t rope people into a longer term deal.

(Speaker 4)
And there’s nothing wrong with doing a longer term deal.

(Speaker 3)
But at the end of the day, it’s month to month. And so my clients, if they don’t have that growth, they’re not going to stick around. And so my average client sticks around for about seven to eight years until they sell their company.

(Speaker 4)
And it starts with about an hour long deep dive, what I call a 13 point assessment, where I sit down with them and I go over every possible question I would wanna know before making that plan, and it takes me between four and 10 hours to make a customized plan for them. This is how you help your clients find that right direction. I mean, you sit down, you do this massive assessment, and now you just know more about them than potentially anybody else in their life, especially when it comes to them in the business sense. So, once you’ve done this assessment, Clay, What specifically is your process for making custom business plans for these individuals? Well, I thought we could do is maybe go over a specific client here, a company reached out to me. And they were already successful.

(Speaker 4)
They were already doing well. And it was called, the guy’s name was Josh Feldman. Josh, F -E -L -L -M -A -N. He made a lot of money in the IT space. And he’d already built multiple successful IT companies. But he kind of wanted to know, how do you create both time freedom and financial freedom?

(Speaker 4)
So I go over a 13 -point assessment. And that thing, we get into first, what are your goals? Because my goals, I don’t like to travel. I don’t like to wear anything except for the same thing every day.

(Speaker 41)
I have a wife and five kids.

(Speaker 4)
So my goals are different. I mean, most people listening to the show right now are going, you never want to travel. So this recent travel ban hasn’t impacted me in terms of traveling at all. Right. I don’t go to concerts. I don’t do group events.

(Speaker 4)
And so I do care about our economy. But it hasn’t bothered me. Now, some of my clients, their goals are normal. They say, I’d like to travel. Or I’d like to maybe not wear the same thing every day. And so we get into, first off, we start off with, what are your goals?

(Speaker 4)
And then once I know what your goals are, then I go over a very detailed assessment where I talk about your branding. So on a scale of 1 to 10, what are your goals? If 10 means your branding is like Tesla, it’s world class, and one is terrible. It looks like somebody who did their best, but it wasn’t good enough made it. Then we go over that, we do the rating of that. Then we go over their website, how highly they’re ranking on the search engines on a scale of one to 10.

(Speaker 4)
If 10 means every time somebody Google searches, and in my case, if you Google search Bill Belichick fan, I always come up top in Google, because I am obsessed with Bill Belichick. And somebody else might say well if you Google Tulsa cookies I want to come up top in Google if you Google Joplin, Missouri gyms I want to come up top and we go over their rank on a scale of one to ten ten being the best one being the worst Then we go over with them How many customers do you need to have per day to achieve your financial goals? And most people have never thought about never ever so yeah, so for me we have on average I don’t know a hundred people a week that reach out for one -on -one business coaching, and I have I don’t know two availabilities a week To talk to somebody and we usually have one availability a month and so I know for me I only want to work with 160 clients because I give them my cell phone number and then they have coaching calls with our consultants But I never want to be so busy I can’t respond to their sometimes urgent needs for my program, but somebody else might have thousands of clients There’s nothing wrong with that. So you go over your goals and then you go over step three. How many hours per week are you willing to work?

(Speaker 4)
Oh, JLD, no one has ever asked that question. And for me, I like to wake up at three in the morning, and I like to grind until about five, six days a week. Oh, it’s beautiful. And now, again, my wife doesn’t like that, so we’ve agreed on a plan that is plan B, and that’s called plan stay and married. When I first got married, I didn’t know that I had to be on the same plane as my wife. I worked every hour.

(Speaker 4)
I’m not kidding. I worked at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV to fund DJConnection . com. Once DJConnection . com got huge, and we were America’s largest wedding entertainment company, this would be like 2004, 2005. I thought, people want to pay me to DJ?

(Speaker 4)
Yes, I shall DJ at the Mall of America for Kevin Garnett’s store. Yes, I shall DJ in Dallas in the same week. Yes, I shall DJ in Nashville. Yes, and my wife’s like, babe, you’re DJing seven nights a week. And I’m going, I’m making a ton of money, baby, for you, for you that I never see. For you, I make it all for you, but I never see you.

(Speaker 4)
So we go over the number of hours they’re willing to work. And then we go over, after we’ve done this, we go over, what’s your unique value proposition? You know, like your show, for instance. Why I like your show is you always put out good energy, you got good energy, and then you always have practical tips, and you interview people that are vetted and that make sense. That’s what makes you great. But there’s some people’s shows that maybe they’re funny, that’s their niche.

(Speaker 4)
Somebody else’s show, maybe they, I don’t know, everyone’s got their own niche. You gotta figure out in the parking space, in the big parking lot of business, where’s the open parking space? And then after that, we’d go over, what is a turnkey marketing system that will create both time freedom and financial freedom for you? So with Josh Feldman, we had to create a system that would allow him to travel around the country in a Winnebago, I believe was his stated goal. And then in return, I asked for a pair of Yeezys. And so he got his Winnebago on his trip, and I got my Yeezys.

(Speaker 4)
But then we go through this whole process. After we go over the marketing systems, then we move in, and it gets more specific. Now we’re getting into the sales system. Do they have scripts in place, standardized pricing? Do they record their calls for quality control? Do they track the lead source?

(Speaker 4)
Do they have a one sheet? Do they track their conversion percentage? And usually it’s no, no. No, oh, I’ve heard about that, but no. And then we go over step eight. What does it cost for you to acquire a new customer?

(Speaker 3)
If you spend $1 ,000 a week on marketing and you get two new customers, it’s $500 a week on marketing. And do you track that?

(Speaker 4)
And then we go over repeatable systems.

(Speaker 3)
Are all your files backed up?

(Speaker 4)
So if you had to shut down your office, like you, how long have you been living in Puerto Rico? Four glorious 4 % tax years.

(Speaker 3)
Now I understand that you and your incredible lady friend, you like to travel, am I correct?

(Speaker 4)
We travel about three months a year. And don’t you do a little Dropbox action or maybe a Google Drive? How do you keep your digital documents organized in the cloud? Yeah, we’re big on the Google Drive. Yeah, so it’s like most of my clients, it’s all on a laptop. And if God forbid they lose the laptop, they’ve lost all of the photos of their child before the age of four.

(Speaker 4)
There’s like a laptop where it’s like, this laptop is the one where I keep all of my receipts. This laptop over here presents my kids’ birthdays. And I can, I don’t know, only 80 % of the time they’ve just recently lost all the files or some of the files and can’t find their passwords. We help them with the file nomenclature. We build the checklist and we make sure everything’s backed up. And then we move on to step 10, managing people.

(Speaker 4)
It turns out when you tell people what to do, They don’t want to do it sometimes because the U . S. Chamber reports that 75 % of employees steal from the workplace. A lot of people don’t know that until they hire people.

(Speaker 25)
And then we make a sustainable schedule, step 11, step 12, almost done.

(Speaker 4)
Do we make a system for recruiting people?

(Speaker 40)
How do you hire, inspire, train, and retain great people?

(Speaker 4)
Do they have scripted training?

(Speaker 27)
posts?

(Speaker 4)
No.

(Speaker 3)
Do they conduct a weekly interview?

(Speaker 4)
No. Do they even know how to lead their team meetings? No. Do they know how to fire somebody? No. Do they know how to motivate somebody?

(Speaker 4)
No. So we go over all that. And then the final step, step 13, this is the one where everybody begins to boo me. They don’t like this one. They don’t like this one.

(Speaker 3)
They like to boo me every time I even bring up this idea. They like to boo.

(Speaker 4)
It’s accounting. and they don’t know that when you earn more, they’re gonna tax you more. And so they’re not, they maybe think they’re living in Puerto Rico, where you have sort of a tax haven there. They think they can live like JLD. I mean, where’s the sound effect for tax haven? Come on, you must have something.

(Speaker 4)
This is my tax haven, the sound effect. They think they live in a tax haven, but they don’t. And then I have to point out to them like, broski. Broseph, ma ‘am, you’re going to owe money, so you’ve got to pay that stuff in quarterly. And then they go, oh, no.

(Speaker 3)
And then I help them automate their savings. And then we want to set up a giveback, so they can give back to a cause. So every single time that they help a customer, they can also donate to a cause. And then we got to set them up on a weekly schedule and we got to repeat this over and over and over until our heads explode. We document it and hopefully we can help them franchise it like we did with TipTopK9 . com or with Oxifresh .

(Speaker 3)
com.

(Speaker 4)
I mean, Fire Nation, if you are just not fired up about these KPIs, about these 13 different steps, about the in -depthness of this assessment that Clay goes through. I mean, what are you doing right now? This is what successful businesses are built upon. And Clay, we’re gonna jump into the break in a couple minutes here. But first off, give us a quick example of part of the proven path for one of your clients. I guess maybe we’re gonna have Josh come on the mic here in a little bit, which would be pretty cool.

(Speaker 4)
So what does that example look like? All the listeners out there, do a search right now for Joplin Gym. So J -O -P -L -I -N, Joplin Gyms, like Joplin, Missouri. And when you do a search for them, you will see, when you do a search for that term, you’ll see Kola Fitness coming up at the top of the search results. Jim Joplin, Colaw Fitness, experienced the highest and most… Places on Google they have five of those of those placements on Google and then their website and then their Facebook And they’re beating a great company by the name of planet fitness.

(Speaker 4)
They’re destroying planet fitness and planet fitness is a huge company And so it’s like David and Goliath and so Charles Kola is as I am like David I need I need the I am going against Goliath I’m going against you know a great company called planet fitness, and they’ve got ten times the budget ten times the The side they have thousands of locations. How can I win? So I say, we’re going to beat him. Here’s the plan. So this is what Charles Kodala has to do every week. And here’s a secret.

(Speaker 4)
And if all the listeners out there can only share it with everybody they know, we’ll just keep it between us and everyone you know. It’s called VISM, VISM. Without a VISM. V -I -S -M, your digital dominance will perish. So step one, okay? V, they have to get video reviews from happy clients every single day.

(Speaker 4)
V, video reviews. And we teach them how to optimize them. I, they want to get images optimized in Google and add them to their site and their Google map every day. S, they want to write at least 500 words of search engine content every single day for their website.

(Speaker 3)
And M, get more Google and Facebook reviews. And that’s their entire marketing plan. That’s it. V -I -S -M. And they have gone from one location to two to three, and they are dominating, not because I’m a genius, but because I’ve taken a complicated idea and made it simple. And because they’re not web developers, my team built a canonically compliant website.

(Speaker 3)
for them, and we shoot the videos for them, and we do the things for them that maybe they don’t have the team to do, but they still have to put in that work. Man, Fire Nation, we’re not complicating things here. Four steps, VISM, video reviews, images, search engine content, more good Facebook and Google reviews. Now those first three, and I love that you made that point, Clay, every single day. And guess what? Is it super easy to create this content every single day?

(Speaker 3)
I mean, it takes work, but guess what? It’s work that Planet Fitness is not putting in, and guess what? They’re losing every single day. The higher the barriers, the lower the competition. Choose and run for those high barriers, Fire Nation, because your competition will be distant if you can even see them at all. So Fire Nation, Charles Cola is gaining all this traction because he’s focusing on these points, this V -I -S -M, and he is working on the key performance indicators in making things happen.

(Speaker 3)
And Fire Nation, we’re about to take a break. When we get back, we actually have one of Clay’s clients in the studio, Josh Fellman. And I just can’t wait for Clay, you to introduce this guy, tell us a little bit about him. And then we’re actually going to bring Josh on because he’s going to give his honest assessment of his process with Clay as well. So don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

(Speaker 3)
Looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104 % per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full -time minimum wage employee? Fire Nation, meet Clay Clark. Clay has been coaching businesses just like yours since 2006. Yep, even through the Great Recession. And he does it for less money than it would cost to hire a full -time minimum wage employee. At a time when Inc.

(Speaker 3)
Magazine reports that by default, 96 % of businesses will fail within 10 years, Clay is helping businesses like yours to grow on average by 104 % annually. You might be wondering, how’s this even possible? Well, Clay only takes on 160 clients, which means he’s able to personally design your business plan. Plus, Clay’s team helps you execute that plan with access to graphic designers, Google certified search engine optimizers, web developers, online advertising managers, videographers, workflow mappers, and accounting coaches to help you get on top of your numbers. Visit thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 3)
com slash fire to see thousands of video testimonials from real clients who Clay has helped over the years. Then schedule your free consultation with Clay himself to see how he and his team can help you thrive. That’s thrivetimeshow . com slash fire. One of the biggest struggles we face as online business owners is building an audience, getting traffic to your website, podcasts, videos, social media channels. It’s not easy, but there’s a framework that you can start using right now to consistently drive your dream customers to your business every day.

(Speaker 3)
Want that framework? Great news, Fire Nation.

(Speaker 4)
My buddy, Russell Brunson is a co -founder of ClickFunnels and has grown his business to a near $1 billion valuation using traffic driving strategies as a I’m podcast . com. So, Clay, we’re back, and man, so much value in the first segment of this podcast episode, and so much more coming, because, I mean, you like to do things in a different kind of way, Clay, which I love, and you actually brought one of your clients into the studio, so we can have, like, a real conversation with him, so it’s not just, like, me and Clay just talking about how awesome Clay is, because, of course, he is, and that’s reality, but let’s bring on somebody else. So, set the stage, Clay. Who do you got for us?

(Speaker 4)
What are we gonna be talking about? Let’s chat. Quick funny story here. After I achieved financial freedom and time freedom and I’d sold some businesses, I found out that the mayor in my town was running unopposed. This woman wanted to run unopposed. And I know your audience has all different political leanings, but the point is, we were on different sides of the aisle.

(Speaker 4)
And I got a chance to know her because she presented me with the Entrepreneur of the Year Award. So I knew this lady.

(Speaker 1)
And I jokingly said, well, I’m going to run against you.

(Speaker 14)
She said, well, you should. And I said, I will. And I did.

(Speaker 4)
And so this guy, Josh, saw me running for mayor of my town at the age of, I think, 26 at the time. That’s how we first met. And then we didn’t really reconnect, I want to say, Josh, for how long until we reconnected? It was probably, what, 10 years maybe, or maybe eight years? Or how long was it? At least that.

(Speaker 4)
What year was that? That was 2000 and… I don’t even know. It was a long time. It was probably eight years, seven years, something like that. And long story short, he’s a bearded man.

(Speaker 14)
He’s a man with a beard.

(Speaker 27)
His website is 500kmsp .

(Speaker 4)
com. 500kmsp.

(Speaker 14)
He does IT consulting.

(Speaker 4)
And he also owns other companies.

(Speaker 3)
And so that’s how I met Josh. And we’ve been working together. Josh, how long have you been stuck with me? Going on two years now? Oh, two years. He says it with great hesitation.

(Speaker 3)
Two years now? Pull up my tracking sheet. It’s been about two years.

(Speaker 4)
OK. One thing I want to do here, Clay, because I just think it’s really fun and really different and really exciting, and you know, this is something I actually have not done in over 25 episodes of Running Entrepreneurs On Fire here, is I kind of want to have you kind of take over the hosting part of the show.

(Speaker 14)
the rest of this episode and walk Josh through the process.

(Speaker 4)
You know, ask him questions. I’ll be here to kind of like say a couple of things, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but let’s be honest. You’ve rocked the Micronauts when it was on fire before. You’re a current host. Awesome sponsor of the show because you know the value of fire nation what we’re doing and I want to find you to get to know a little bit more about you not just as the interviewee but you know as a great host that you are for your own show and now on entrepreneurs on fire, so Take Josh through these next few things that we wanted to talk about and I’m gonna kind of hand off the controls I’m still here. I’ll still be yapping in but take it away brother.

(Speaker 4)
Yeah, so Josh How long have you been a self -employed person before you and I ever started coaching together? Yeah Since the age of at least eight years old, my mother convinced me to deliver cookies door -to -door to the local Ace Hardware. Cookies, and they like lunch, and so I would trot myself down there to the Ace Hardware and sell cookies at age eight. And where did you have your first traction, where you thought, you know what, I may win as an entrepreneur? When did you have your first big win as an entrepreneur? How old were you approximately, and what were you doing?

(Speaker 4)
Well, it was in… 2008, I decided to start a third IT company. It turns out 2008 is a great year to start a company for specifically IT companies because companies fire their IT people and hire somebody that’s half the cost. And so we did really well during a recession. And so when I was in business school, school was in the way of me making money but there was one thing I did take out of school which is revenue generating activities for businesses most businesses have sales and most businesses have service and IT is an oddity in that it has a third third revenue producing vehicle that is a recurring revenue website hosting backups and so I thought that was an oddity and I’ve been able to make a lot more money than a typical business, because it’s more revenue. So for the listeners out there of this great show, great program, that aren’t familiar with what it’s like to be stuck in a room with me, first off, talk about the growth you’ve experienced, and then talk about what it’s like to be stuck in a room with somebody who only goes 95 miles an hour, while being laser focused.

(Speaker 4)
So let’s go with, what kind of growth have you had? Have you grown a little bit? Well, um, and since April of, let’s see, that would be April of last year. So we’re coming up on April of this year. So in two years, I’ve gone from, I reached out to Clay to help develop me as a coach. I had some knowledge as a technician and I, I needed to know how do I communicate this to another human being using words.

(Speaker 4)
Um, and, and he’s taught me how to be funny, how to, you know, how to communicate this to somebody else where they actually understand it. And so almost two years ago, I asked him to help me create an IT coaching company to communicate some knowledge that I had learned.

(Speaker 39)
and we went from zero revenue to we’re billing almost $40 ,000 a month in customer.

(Speaker 4)
So from zero revenue to 40 ,000 a month? Right, I think we were at 30, pull up my tracking sheet if you want to, but I think we were at 35 ,000 a month, but we’ve closed two more clients.

(Speaker 28)
And then you have other businesses too, don’t you have like an arcade? So when I sold my third IT company in 2017, I was approached by three individuals who Had made some significant amount of money But they didn’t know what to do with it and they asked myself and my business partner to help either acquire or grow Companies for them so essentially I now am the president of a small venture capital fund where we started To date we’ve started two companies one is an arcade and bar in McKinney, Texas cool And the second is we acquired a laundromat

(Speaker 4)
And are they growing, too? The laundromat we acquired on paper, it was supposed to have a cash -on -cash return based on the money I put into it. It was supposed to make a 14 % net profit. Sure. And it is currently making a 28 % net profit. Oh, yes.

(Speaker 4)
I’m going to give myself a megapoint right there.

(Speaker 3)
I live for these megapoints. Megapoint. Megapoint. Oh, I love megapoints. I love megapoints.

(Speaker 14)
What is the worst part and the most difficult part of having me work with you every week? Because I think people out there, they say they want to grow. I have never served in the military like JLD did, but it’s kind of like a boot camp, is how people tell me. They say it’s kind of like, I don’t know, you show up and you thought maybe it was going to be like going to Disney World and all of a sudden a general sergeant shows up, but you’re paying him somehow.

(Speaker 4)
Can you explain what it’s like to be stuck in a room with me?

(Speaker 38)
Josh, I will protect you as well, brother.

(Speaker 4)
I’m a tank commander. I’ve been to Iraq.

(Speaker 31)
I’ll make it happen.

(Speaker 4)
So whatever you say, I want to hear the best, but I also want to hear the worst.

(Speaker 14)
Clay Clark has a unique ability to speak truth to you, and you’re thankful for it.

(Speaker 4)
you want to come back for more and you, you feel disappointed to let him down.

(Speaker 3)
Um, at least that the way it is for me. Um, he, I’ve learned, I’ve learned some specific things in, in communicating knowledge to somebody else. You have to be funny or you won’t be listened to, or you’ll be immediately Unheard or dismissed boring will put you out of business. Oh, it will. Oh, it’s not good now You the thing I would say though is we our team does the back -end support for you, too so we’ve helped you build your website and done your videos and done the launching of the ads and then he actually JLD decided to hire our team to make outbound calls we do that as a service for clients outbound On behalf of your company to help you acquire clients.

(Speaker 14)
So we were actually the marketing vehicle that called And we charge $25 an hour, and I think we were doing about 10 hours a week, of course. for you. I think at the peak, maybe doing 40 hours a week of calls. I believe that’s correct. Could you maybe explain the value of having a call center that’s making calls for you that you don’t have to employ beyond anything beyond just a month -to -month relationship?

(Speaker 4)
Yeah, and let me just break in before even Josh answers and just say, imagine that. Like, not having to go out, find, hire, train, and then like overlook. I mean, $25 an hour, you’re literally handed a call center for as many hours as you want. Mind blown. Josh, go ahead. Yeah, so it’s immensely valuable for someone who can do their own cold calling to a certain extent, although Clay has a unique way of mentoring talent that exceeds even something that somebody who’s been in sales for a number of years would be able to accomplish.

(Speaker 28)
But specifically for me, I have leads sent to me that I can simply reach out to at an appropriate time.

(Speaker 4)
They’ve already set an appointment for me. They set somewhere between two and four appointments for me a week, which is right about where I want to be. And I simply call them and close them. And the calls are recorded for quality assurance too, so you can listen to the calls. We made a script together, but then you listen to the calls every week and provide feedback on it. I want to get into this because I don’t want the wrong person to reach out to me and say, I thought I was going to be talking to a Build -A -Bear representative, and I ended up talking to Chuck Norris.

(Speaker 4)
I mean, Ko, could you kind of explain what person would not be a good fit to reach out to us? Because I want everybody who’s listening to this show to be blessed. There’s a lot of programs that are a good fit, but I don’t want the wrong person reaching out. You know what I mean? So if you are a, what Clay refers to as a happy hoper, if you’re looking for a magic pill for somebody just to do it for you, but you’re unwilling to follow up, they’re gonna set leads for you, and then you’re not gonna follow up, and then you’re going to blame the leads, and it’s your fault, because you didn’t follow up. What I did here, JLD, to make it easier for your listeners is I made a landing page called thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 4)
com forward slash EO fire. Thrivetimeshow . com forward slash eofire. And I asked if my 160 clients would be willing to allow me to share their website address, their first name and last name, and the actual growth percentage at which they grew last year, so you could see the roster and see if they’re like you or not. And currently, last year, the average client grew by 104%. Well, put that there for all your listeners, and that way they can see.

(Speaker 14)
And my final thing I wanted to see if you could share is, You know I only work with 160 clients.

(Speaker 4)
Correct. And people hear that and they go, no you don’t.

(Speaker 3)
You’re going to take on any client there is. And you’ve seen me, because you’ve been, you’ve shadowed me. I allow all my clients to shadow. You’ve seen me tell someone they’re not a good fit. Why do you believe that I only take on 160? I mean, there’s a math to it at JLD. We have 47 employees full time that help to support our clients.

(Speaker 3)
But could you maybe explain why we only take on 160 from your perspective? Because it hurts your head to deal with a lame ass every day. Oh, Shonda, that was right there. All right, flashbacks. Back to you in the booth. You know, Fire Nation, there’s a reason why, number one, I want to have Clay back on Entremets on Fire.

(Speaker 3)
I mean, he absolutely crushed it earlier in the year. And you responded in a massive way because he gave an incredible offer and you guys just took it up, um, you know, to the next level.

(Speaker 4)
And then Clay and I were chatting and he’s just like, yo, your audience resonates so well with me and my brand and what I do. He’s like, I need, I want to get in front of your audience more. Like I want to sponsor the show, which is obviously why Clay sponsoring this show that we’re talking about right now that you heard during the pre -roll, the mid -roll and you’ll hear during the post -roll, but also you may be hearing from him a lot over the next year on entrepreneurial on Fire because he’s just got his system down. He knows who his core audience is and he knows that you, Fire Nation, are right up his alley. So, Clay, Why don’t you maybe talk about the opportunity that Fire Nation has?

(Speaker 4)
And it’s a limited opportunity, let’s be honest, because you only work with 160 clients. So what do you want Fire Nation to really get from this conversation that you and I had during the first part of the show? Obviously, the great conversation that Josh added to as well. Take it away. Well, I would just say Christina Niemes with Cape Cod, autobodyanddetailing . com is one example.

(Speaker 4)
I believe she heard of me through you, that’s my understanding today. And she’s based in the Boston area and she said, could you shoot a commercial that’ll get traction? I said, sure. So one of our employees has a bulldog named Chauncey and we had Chauncey mouth the words and then I do the Boston accent and she gets the leads. She said, could you get us to the top of Google? I said, sure.

(Speaker 4)
Could you say, could you help me make checklists? I said, yep.

(Speaker 37)
But it all started with a 13 -point assessment.

(Speaker 4)
So if you go to thrivetimeshow . com forward slash EO fire, it’s thrivetimeshow . com forward slash EO fire, you’re gonna go there. And if you fill out the form to schedule a 13 -point assessment, most people have told me that that assessment alone changes their life. And I say that because when you have more money, as Christina does, she grew by 67 % last year, then you can buy back your time. So you can pay a personal assistant to do something, or you can pay someone to mow your lawn, or you can pay someone to get the groceries, or you can just afford to pay for health care.

(Speaker 4)
So again, I’m not talking about, I’m not a big feelings guy, and there’s a lot of great guests you’ve had on your show that talk about Motivation and alignment and a lot of things that really do matter what I’m looking for are people that say I am motivated I’m fired up. I just need to have a linear path. Yeah, so we do the 13 -point assessment for you. And that alone is a life -changing thing for people. Then also, we do a complete web analysis.

(Speaker 4)
When you reach out and schedule a 13 -point assessment, we always do a free complimentary web analysis. Now, this web analysis is something that I used to charge well over $1 ,500 for. I used to charge about $2 ,000 to $1 ,500, depending on how big the site was. The only thing I can compare it to would be, if you go to bruceclay . com, he’s a great podcast guest of mine I’ve had. He writes Search Engine for Dummies every year, or Gary Grant with SEO Inc.

(Speaker 4)
He charges between $4 ,000 and $6 ,000 a month. These are great people. Their whole business is doing search engine optimization, but because I own actual companies, Helping you grow your company is sort of like my hobby. It’s what I do for fun.

(Speaker 21)
And so I use my team that works with my companies to help you with your business.

(Speaker 4)
So in a way, business coaching for me is more of like my calling than it is my profit center. And so because of that, we can have our team pull a battery of reports and tell you specifically what’s wrong with your website behind the scenes. Because it might look great. It might have a great visual look to it. But as you and I know, if the title tags are wrong, or if the keywords are wrong, if the XML site map is wrong, if the site speed is wrong, if you don’t have enough words on every page, if you have duplicate content, I mean, there’s just all these things that are wrong. And so we’re going to do the assessment for you for the low, low price of free, which is a shocking number.

(Speaker 4)
Then we’re going to do a complete web audit for you for free. Then I’m going to tell you at least two or three bad jokes if you get through the vetting process for free. Nothing says I love you more than bad jokes. Holy cow. So I’m going to hit you with the bad jokes. You’re going to leave going, that guy’s weird.

(Speaker 4)
Man, I learned a lot. You get all that stuff. And then I made a e -book copy. We have written over a dozen books. And so I made a free e -book copy. available for all of your listeners.

(Speaker 4)
Again, by going to thrivetimeshow . com forward slash EO fire, you can download my search engine domination book, which has been a bestseller on Amazon for the past year. You can download that for free. You can download The Art of Getting Things Done for free. And these are some of these books have been Amazon bestsellers. You can download the ebook version all for free.

(Speaker 4)
You get bad jokes for free. You get a web assessment for free. You get the 13 point assessment for free. I mean, really, it’s just it’s it’s a lot of free. And the only way you could possibly pay me, and by the way, if you do pay me, it’s seventeen hundred dollars a month. And you say, well, why is it seventeen hundred a month?

(Speaker 4)
Because I operated a 20 % profit margin. So I’m going to make an outstanding $340 per month to provide all that value for you on a month -to -month basis. And I’m very transparent about that. And we do have a scholarship program for client in need. And we do two clients a month like that, where we help you out at a discounted rate, where we kind of meet you where you’re at. I don’t like to do that for every client, because it wouldn’t be financially sustainable.

(Speaker 4)
But if all your listeners will Google Joplin Gyms, you can see our handiwork.

(Speaker 3)
If you Google Tulsa Cookies, you can see Barbie Cookies, and you can see that handiwork. If you Google search Satellite Beach Pizzeria, you can see Papa Gallo’s, you can see our handiwork, or if you just go to thrivetimeshow . com and you click on testimonials, you can see, check this out, over a thousand current or former clients sharing their testimonials about how the system worked. Remember, nothing works unless you do. Maya Angelou said, nothing works unless you do. So you gotta be a doer.

(Speaker 3)
Don’t just be a hearer. Don’t think this is a TED Talks. This is like a TED Talks with the follow -up.

(Speaker 36)
Okay, folks, we’re gonna follow up.

(Speaker 3)
That’s what it’s all about. Fire Nation, Clay walks the walk, he talks the talk. That’s why I brought him back on the show. That’s why I agreed to have him as a sponsor, because I am so obsessed with my sponsors only delivering amazing value to you, Fire Nation.

(Speaker 4)
So believe me, I know Clay delivers. And Clay, in closing, I just want to ask you this question. I think it might be on some of Fire Nation’s minds, and I just really want to give you the stage once again to take this home, to close it down, and then we’ll say goodbye. And that is.. .

(Speaker 4)
You’ve long ago achieved financial freedom, achieved time freedom, and that’s amazing things. And a lot of people who are listening might be like, why is this guy not on a beach in Puerto Rico, just like sipping Mai Tais and like just relaxing? What motivates you to coach your clients? What is the real reason? I believe, and I know it is entirely possible to go to college, to earn a degree, and to learn very little about how to earn money. In fact, as a general rule, most of the general education out there is kind of like memorizing the History Channel.

(Speaker 4)
It’s like you learned a lot about the Byzantine Empire, and it might be fascinating, but it’s not wealth creating. And I grew up in a home where my dad delivered pizzas at Domino’s. He worked the night shift at Quick Trip convenience stores to pay the bills. And I sincerely mean this. I thought that my father didn’t like me until I was able to hire him when I was 27 years old. And I was talking with my dad, and I’m like, dad, why were you always working?

(Speaker 4)
He’s like, to put food on the table. Now, my dad has a college degree from Oral Roberts University. And imagine what that felt like as a kid. And a lot of your listeners can relate to this. My dad just worked his ass off constantly because he wanted to provide. But my dad wasn’t one of those dads who comes home and goes, that’s right.

(Speaker 4)
I’ve been working for you. He was a quiet guy. He just worked. And from the age of 27, when I hired my dad, he’s like, what am I gonna do for you, son? I said, you can just come be a dad, I’ll put you on payroll, you can help me with the books, I need someone I can trust. He moved from Minnesota to Tulsa to come work with me.

(Speaker 4)
And when he died of Lou Gehrig’s on September 5th, three years ago, I can honestly say I had no regrets. I got all that time with my dad. And there’s so many people out there that are exchanging all their time for very little money. And that just makes zero sense. If you’re going to go out there today and hire a minimum wage employee, let’s say you’re in the great state of Michigan or something, okay? You hire an employee for $12 an hour, $11 an hour.

(Speaker 4)
Let’s say you’re in Oklahoma. You hire someone for $7 .25 an hour. If you hire somebody for $12 an hour after payroll taxes and they work for you 40 hours a week for 4 .3 weeks a month, That means that you’re going to pay that person $2 ,064 a month before factoring in payroll taxes, and providing them an office, and all the costs of hiring them, and finding them, and recruiting them. You know what I mean? There’s a lot of hidden costs associated with hiring somebody. And for less money than it would cost you to hire even one full -time minimum wage employee, We can change your life, and we will change your life.

(Speaker 3)
And I am serious about it. My dad recently died, and that’s not fun, but man, how terrible would my life have been if I didn’t have certain key mentors in my life?

(Speaker 4)
And I’ll tell you this, none of my mentors reached out to me. I had to go pay these people. I paid Michael Levine, the PR consultant for Michael Jackson and Prince and Nike, best -selling author Michael Levine.

(Speaker 35)
He worked with Charlton Heston.

(Speaker 4)
I paid Home Skillet $25 ,000 to teach how PR works. $25 ,000! And it was worth every dollar of it, because now I can get my clients like Josh with Living Water Irrigation on the Kelly Clarkson Show and the Today Show, and I can get clients like Oxifresh on Fox News. I know how to do it now. But $25 ,000, I paid Bruce Clay, I think it was $8 ,000 a month for 12 consecutive months to learn how search engines work. I mean, and I’m glad I did, but JLD, that’s some money right there.

(Speaker 4)
That’s some dough. I paid some money. And if I was right now and I wanted to be a podcaster, I’d pay you to learn how to podcast, because it turns out you know how to podcast. Heck yeah. If I didn’t have the motivation to keep podcasting every day, I’d pay you whatever that fee is. I’d call and go, JLD, how’d you stay motivated when you had two downloads a week?

(Speaker 4)
Because remember that when you started, the momentum was due. Before you met Kate, you’re getting that momentum going. It’s you against the world. You’re recording. You got two downloads a week, maybe five a week. And then all of a sudden, people go, oh, man, must be nice.

(Speaker 4)
And you go, yeah, I enjoyed the process. But people don’t see the messy middle. The messy middle is the gap between the results that you want to get to and the dream that you just had last night. And somebody has to bridge the gap. And most people who are successful like to travel. Not me.

(Speaker 4)
Most people who are successful like to go on vacations. Not me. They like to go to NFL games. Not me. They like to go to parties. Not me.

(Speaker 4)
They have hobbies and other interests. Not me. It’s just my wife. my five kids, and growing companies. That’s all I got.

(Speaker 3)
If you’re looking for a guy who’s the most interesting man in the world, that’s not me. But I live behind a wall at Camp Clark in Chicken Palace, where I myopically focus on my clients, and I feel it’s a calling, from the Latin word meaning, the word vocation meaning calling. I feel like I’m called to do this, and this is what I was called to do. I’m almost 40 years old. I don’t know how many more years I have left on this great planet, but this is what I’m gonna do. I’ll be a 70 -year -old doing this, and my hero in the game of business is Paul Graham.

(Speaker 3)
Paul Graham’s my hero. If you Google search Paul Graham, he’s the coach behind Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit. And he was the one who kind of paved the way for what I want to do. And Paul Graham’s my inspiration. Fire Nation, if you are literally not pressing pause right now and visiting ThriveTimeShow . com slash EO Fire, check your pulse.

(Speaker 4)
I mean, with what Clay just shared, with the immense amount of free value that he’s delivering to you on that site, it’s just unbelievable.

(Speaker 3)
The assessment, the website check, the books, all the jazz, his book. transferred to you and your business, injecting it, especially during these crazy times, Fire Nation, this is what you need. So you know this, Fire Nation, you’re the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with and you’ve been hanging out, with CC and JLD today, so keep up that heat and head over to thrive timeshow . com slash EO fire.

(Speaker 34)
The next stage in your life, Fire Nation, the next stage in your business starts at the end of that URL.

(Speaker 3)
Hit it, make it happen. Clay, Josh, thank you both for sharing your truth, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flip side. Take care. Hey Fire Nation, today’s value bomb content was brought to you by Clay and you know this.

(Speaker 4)
Successful entrepreneurs, they accomplish big goals. Fire Nation, that’s why I created a journal that helps you do just that. It’s called the Freedom Journal and it gives you that freedom to accomplish your number one goal in 100 days with step by step processes, you name it. Visit thefreedomjournal . com. Use promo code podcast for a $15 discount as a thank you for listening to my podcast and I’ll catch you there Fire Nation or I’ll catch you on the road.

(Speaker 4)
the flip side. Looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104 % per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full -time minimum wage employee? Schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark at Thrivetimeshow . com slash fire Thrivetimeshow . com slash fire. All right, Thrive Nation, I want to tell you a story today about a gentleman I had the opportunity to meet years and years ago.

(Speaker 4)
And he has really scaled his company. He’s been just a great friend.

(Speaker 1)
And he’s a guy who money is a magnifier.

(Speaker 2)
So when you help somebody make more money, it just makes them more of who they are. He’s a generous man. He’s a hardworking man.

(Speaker 4)
He’s actually a CPA. Some people tell me, Clay, doesn’t a CPA stand for a certified pain in the ass?

(Speaker 22)
I don’t think that’s always true, folks.

(Speaker 16)
There are some good ones out there.

(Speaker 4)
And we’re joined here with a longtime client, Paul Hood. Welcome to The Thrive Time Show.

(Speaker 2)
How are you, sir? Hey, like my old friend R . D. Mercer said, CPA stands for Certified Professional Ass Kicker, not Certified Pain in the Ass. I’ve got 11 questions for you in about 10 minutes. So here we go.

(Speaker 2)
Let’s get it. Let’s get it. How did you and I first meet? Or I guess maybe when did you and I first start working together? So back in the day, you know, I had, I still do, I have a really nice car and I was sitting at a restaurant and the manager came up and said, Hey, do you know this guy, Steve Currington? And I said, no.

(Speaker 2)
And he’s, and I said, why?

(Speaker 4)
And he said, well, cause he’s got these nice cars and you really need to meet him. So I met Steve. And the first time I met him, he was dressed up in a Hulk outfit at a fundraiser yelling Hulk smash over the place. And I had been searching clay for I had built a business that was doing about $3 million, had about three offices. And I wanted to go from successful to systematic. And I asked Steve, who do I talk to?

(Speaker 4)
And he said, you got to meet my guy. And then he got me to one of your workshops.

(Speaker 2)
I said, holy smokes, you know, I went to the best, one of the best accounting schools in the country, and they didn’t teach anything that you were teaching. So I was lit from the day one. Now, I remember when you came to the conference and watching you take notes. I mean, you were smoking out that. We had a notebook for taking notes, and it was like the piece of paper was going to set to fire because you were taking so many notes and you were engaging with all the different successful entrepreneurs. And I knew that your business was going to scale because previous to meeting me, you’d already built a business.

(Speaker 2)
business. You were top of your class in college. But I knew you could scale. Just to give the listeners some sort of an idea in their mind, how much have you grown from the time that you and I first met to now, just to give you some context? Yeah, so last year, Clay, so we went from about $3 million in revenue. with three offices to now we have 17 offices across four states.

(Speaker 2)
And last year we did 20 million dollars.

(Speaker 4)
And you know we’re poised. Now my industry is in a kind of a change or die scenario. And we are literally fighting off private equity companies that are wanting to throw money at us to be a part of what we’re doing because you helped me create what, in my world, they call the platform firm. How do you take a wisdom -based business and scale it? And it was actually pretty simple. It’s actually made me angry.

(Speaker 4)
I’ve told you multiple times, I went to college and they didn’t teach me this stuff. And you’re saying, have a meeting with your people. Well, what does that mean? And you played a massive role in our expansion. Well, Paul, I want to talk to you about this.

(Speaker 2)
This might feel like a backhanded compliment, but that’s not the way I mean it. You were graduating near the top of your class. I mean, you have been a very successful accountant before I met you. But I believe that when we met, you didn’t have a website. And maybe that seems like it’s a backhanded compliment. I don’t want it to feel that way.

(Speaker 2)
I’m saying you were like top of your class CPA, but yet the marketing didn’t match how quality of a service you provide. Maybe I’m getting that wrong. I’d love to get your just can you let me talk about that. Because I believe you were a top of the class CPA with a non -existent Web site. Yeah. Yeah.

(Speaker 2)
So you know it’s it’s I hear what you’re saying.

(Speaker 33)
You’re saying is oh my God how this guy ever become as successful.

(Speaker 4)
He was before he met me. But the reality is again, business school, they teach you how to be a technician. They don’t teach you how to grow a business, how to manage people, how to create leads, how to create that marketing funnel, that sales funnel that goes into it. And I remember the first time we met individually, you said, well, let’s look at your website. And I said, what website?

(Speaker 4)
Because I’m a professional, and professionals get new business off of referrals. And, um, dude, you turned on that website and we started getting Google reviews and videos. And, and I’ll tell you in the three months of the beginning of this year, um, my sales team closed 400 new clients in three months, all off of inbound calls, meaning they called us. And that’s all because of what you’ve done with social media, with, with content and, and, uh, and that website. So. Bravo.

(Speaker 4)
Now we talk about, you know, one of the things that you did, which I loved is you, there are what we call passive learners, people that watch information and they don’t think about how to apply it to their lives. Then there’s active learners. You are an active learner.

(Speaker 2)
You see something and you think, how can I apply this to my life? And so I remember when you came to the workshop, You almost immediately, we started talking about renovating your offices on the outside and the inside. So basically renovating the brand, like the website, the digital marketing. but also renovating the way your physical CPA practices looked inside. I think in your Claremore office, you renovated your Claremore office. I’m going to try to pull it up on the screen so people can see this.

(Speaker 2)
But you actually implemented so many of the things quickly. And so you actually went through the process of renovating your office inside and outside. Why did you decide to renovate your office on the inside and the outside after the pandemic? been to workshops and conferences? Why did you decide to do that? Because very few people do that.

(Speaker 2)
Well, it was two things, Clay. The first thing is when I had clients coming to me and they’d say, you know, they’d rather go to their dentist than see me.

(Speaker 4)
And people buy what they want, not what they need. And we were selling what they needed, not what they wanted. And so we needed to portray a success -minded, an anti -CPA environment, if you will, with the slogans and the positive saying and the financial things. And it’s kind of weird, though, Clay, because if you compare your office And my office, they strangely look alike. I’m not saying I copied off of you, but they strangely look alike. We want to sell success.

(Speaker 4)
We don’t want to just do tax returns. We want to sell success. And that’s what I jumped all over going to you. I told you one time, Clay, I could live in your office. It’s the success and the positive and the motivation that’s created.

(Speaker 2)
And so I wanted to recreate that in my offices. Now, other things that you implemented successfully, and again, I’m just trying to brag on some of the wonderful things you’ve been able to accomplish, is you and I talked and you said, Clay, I have a desire in my heart to write a book. And so you and I worked together on writing your first book, Take a Look Under the Hood, which is a phenomenal book there. You and I did that together. And then the next book here is called Roadkill Tastes Like Chicken. And again, I can’t help somebody to typeset a book or to make a cover if someone doesn’t write the book.

(Speaker 2)
And so you were willing to put in the work, and then we were able to work together to produce the end result. What would you say to somebody who’s on the outside of the website right now who’s thinking about becoming a client of ours? And we have sort of a, our business is designed, I only take on 160 clients. And so I work with a lot of the same people year after year after year. So what would you say about the amount of effort you had to put in to something like the website or writing the book? And then maybe what would you say about how, what kind of work we put in, just so you kind of explain how that relationship works?

(Speaker 2)
Yeah, Clay, I’m still astonished at what all you guys were willing to do. You took and you proved to me that you can do this with any business, a business that wants to grow, a business that wants to be seen, a business that wants to measure profitability, a business that wants to start with the end in mind, you have all the tools to do that. And again, Clay, I’m waiting for the check in the mail, but you’re not paying me to say this stuff, it’s reality. I always said, and we’ve sent you a lot of clients over the years that you’re the offense, I’m the defense, you show them how to make it, I show them how to keep it. I wrote the first book, really, frankly, you wrote most of the book. I mean, I went through, you did a lot of stuff, and I added some verbiage and made it, you know, kind of more towards CPA, the defense side, if you will.

(Speaker 2)
And in the second book, you know, you taught me that it’s not about making money. It’s about sowing seeds. It’s about changing people’s lives. It’s about, one of the first things that you and I talked about is why am I wanting to do this? What’s the intent? what difference am I going to make in the world?

(Speaker 2)
And, and, you know, with wealth, when you create wealth, you get attention, and therefore people give you credibility, and they’re more apt to do, you know, what you advise. And I, you know, I have a great lifestyle. But what I wanted to do is, with the book with you, with my business

(Speaker 4)
is how do I break generational sin or generational punishment? Or in my book, I call it pigs don’t know pigs stink. Because if my mom hadn’t made a change and said no to being abused and alcoholism, I’d probably be some drunk Indian smacking a woman around. It wouldn’t be my wife, because she’s German. She’d cut me. She’d hurt me.

(Speaker 4)
And now I’ve got a college degree and all my kids have college degrees. And so it’s beyond just, I feel like people owe it not only to themselves, to their community, to their family, to people they don’t even know, to be successful and then to sow those seeds of success in other people. And frankly, Clay, I admire you. I am astounded by your knowledge and how you can take a business from where I was to where I am now And it’s all about sharing life’s successes, because you can create wealth and benefit the world.

(Speaker 2)
But if you can teach other people to create wealth and how to benefit the world, that’s amazing. So bravo to you, Clay. I appreciate that very much. I’ve got three final questions for you, three final questions. I want to tap into your wisdom on this. One of the things about your business that blew my mind is that if we typed in Tulsa CPAs into Google or whatever market you’re in, we couldn’t find you.

(Speaker 2)
So it’s kind of hard for people sometimes to grasp the idea that the best accountant isn’t findable, that the best dentist isn’t findable. People typically, they go to Google, they type in the search term, and whatever comes up top, that’s who they call. And I wanted to ask you if you could share about the impact that search engine optimization maybe has had on your business. Because I think a lot of dentists, doctors, lawyers, photographers, web developers, people I meet at conferences, we just had a big conference with Tim Tebow last week, and I meet these people who are the best chiropractor in their area, the best neurosurgeon, the best whatever, and people can’t find them. Could you talk about the impact that… engine optimization has made on the business?

(Speaker 2)
It’s immeasurable, Clay. Earlier I had mentioned we brought in like 400 new clients organically in three months, two and a half months. All of them were what’s called inbound liens, meaning they reached out to me. They weren’t referred to me by another client. They were actually Googled CPAs and they looked at reviews and videos. And so when you and I first met, I said, people don’t look for CPAs on Google.

(Speaker 2)
you know, they call their friends or whatever.

(Speaker 4)
And you smiled and shook your head and said, OK. And you set out to prove me wrong. And you did. And so anybody, especially in a service business, You can call me, and I’ll tell you that I didn’t believe Clay Clark for a minute, but it has magnified the reach that we have. And what it’s done for us, Clay, it’s allowed us to be selective on what clients we take. And these clients are calling us.

(Speaker 2)
We don’t have to pick up the phone and call them. They’re calling us. And it’s 100 % off of Google, Google Reviews, Google Searches. I’ll admit it right here, you proved me wrong. People do look for CPAs off of Google. They look for doctors, dentists, attorneys as well.

(Speaker 2)
Now, my final 90 seconds here for you in the hot seat, you know, the conferences. Dr. Zellner participates in the conferences. You know, we’ve had Tim Tebow, Michael Levine. We’ve had the head of Harley Davidson. I mean over the years we just continue to bring in new folks. But when you get past the big names could you maybe describe what the conferences are like or what what kind of an impact of the conferences had on your business.

(Speaker 2)
Yeah. So the main thing is you know as a business owner you know there is plenty of times I felt like I’m alone. You know there’s nobody that thinks like me. I’ve got great staff, but they go home at the end of the day and you fight negativity and all that. And you don’t know what you’re doing. Nobody taught me how to be a successful business owner in business school.

(Speaker 2)
And then I go to your workshop, it’s positive. I’m surrounded by forward, positive thinking, hardworking, success -minded people. And then you start laying out the very simplistic methodologies because Clay, you taught me there is a pattern to success. And here’s what you do. And in your workshops, for the pride, my gosh, you need to quadruple the cost of that going in there. Because if somebody now here’s what I really like about it.

(Speaker 2)
I’m not an excuse maker. I don’t make excuses.

(Speaker 4)
And a lot of people like to go and then, oh, I can’t do it. I don’t know what I’m doing. Or my, you know, my mama couldn’t, my dad couldn’t, so I can’t. And your workshops take all excuses away. All you got to do is be willing to put in some effort and show up. There’s a pattern to success.

(Speaker 4)
It’s teachable, it’s replicatable, and it’s engaging. I would absolutely recommend anybody and everybody to go to your workshop, because one, you’re going to walk out of there, you’re going to be on fire, you’re ready to go. But Clay, you give practical steps on what to do. And all I got to do is do it. And that’s what I did. Even though I didn’t believe you, you proved me wrong.

(Speaker 4)
And here we are, we’re five times the size we were when like seven times almost the size we were when we met you a few years ago. Final question for you. People when they think about growing a business they think about sales.

(Speaker 2)
They think about marketing. They think about accounting. They think about workflow. They think about human related human resources. They think about public speaking. They think about

(Speaker 2)
PR. They think about social media ads. And people always ask me, they go, OK, so you help people with workflows. Or they’ll go, OK, so you’re the website guy.

(Speaker 4)
Or you’re the book writing guy. Or you’re the whatever guy. How would you describe what it is that our business coaching platform does or what it’s done for you? So what you’ve done for me and what I’ve seen you do for clients is you clearly define the success pattern.

(Speaker 32)
The success pattern that you taught me is you define where you’re at, you define where you wanna go, you create a plan, you execute the plan, you measure results, you modify the plan.

(Speaker 4)
In that plan, there’s a lot of consistencies, no matter if you’re a pool business, if you’re a lawn business, or you’re a CPA. And so what you did was, and I’m a proponent of going to college, especially the CPA, you have to, But if I didn’t have to, I could have skipped all that crap and hung out with you for a couple years and learned every step of the way.

(Speaker 32)
Because every business that I’ve sent to you or that I work with, maybe they’re good in this area, but they’re not good in these areas.

(Speaker 2)
And so to be able to bring the thing full circle, regardless, and Clay, and again, this is a compliment. You’ve done this with many, many different businesses. So you’re the guy that takes away excuses. If you want to be successful, there’s a pattern. Show up, do the work, modify your plan, and reap the rewards. Paul, I really do appreciate you.

(Speaker 2)
And I want people to know about the resources that you provide. You have a wonderful team there at hoodcpas . com, hoodcpas . com. We have typically about a million listeners that will listen to this show on a typical week or every couple of weeks. What are the solutions that you provide there at paulhood .

(Speaker 2)
com? Well, so what we do is we’re different than most CPAs because my industry is in a really a change or die scenario.

(Speaker 4)
75 % of CPAs are at above retirement age. There’s about 90 % of the firms that are out there are potential acquisition targets. So what we have to do is we have to re -envision and you help me with this, re -envision what we do. We sell success, Clay, just like you do. We’re not marketing people, though. So like I said, you’re the offense, we’re the defense.

(Speaker 20)
We teach people and how to minimize their income tax. How to maximize returns?

(Speaker 2)
How do you keep more, save more, protect more? And we do it in a format, Clay, that’s a membership type model to where it’s a fixed fee. So every time you call us, you’re not getting a bill. And same thing, it’s very predictable. Keep more, save more, protect more, not just do your tax return. Paul, I really do appreciate you carving out time to join us today.

(Speaker 2)
Again, folks, that’s paulhood . com. You say, what’s the website? It’s paulhood . com. If you need a CPA in a major way, check out paulhood .

(Speaker 2)
com. Paul Hood, thank you so much for your time today, sir. We’ll talk to you soon. See you, brother. See ya. Bye bye.

(Speaker 2)
My business, it consists, I’m a CPA and a financial advisor and we’re very successful. I want to go from successful to systematic. I want to learn systems and processes so that the business can run without me. The atmosphere here at Thrive and Clay’s office and the team is very upbeat, very positive, very proactive, very forward -looking. They have very specific things that they can offer. Clay’s delivery is very unique.

(Speaker 2)
He’s very, he’s one of the most people I’ve ever met, but he’s also one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. So he combines those in a very, very awesome way. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned at the workshop is to be very deliberate, to be very specific, to have a plan in mind, and then they can help you put together the processes to get it done. A favorite aspect is probably just how entertaining it is. And the fact that I pick up one or two or three things every time I come to take my business to the next level.

(Speaker 2)
Well, if people are missing out on basically a plan, a guaranteed plan, pretty much, if you’re willing to work it, to be successful. Most people, I think everybody should attend one of these workshops at least once because you don’t know what you don’t know. And we’re not taught to be successful in school. What I’ve learned is my college degree is great for preparing me to be a technician, but to be a business owner and to create a process or a business that can continue without me, I’m not there. I’ve been looking at it, looking for such processes for a while and what Clay is showing me is is how to do that step -by -step. Well, I’ve enjoyed the entire workshop.

(Speaker 2)
What I’ve liked the most is Clay’s presentation style. You know, you go to seminars. I’m 49. I’ve gone to seminars for 30 years. And this first seminar I’ve gone to that is entertaining, both entertaining and it’s very usable information. The atmosphere of Thrive Headquarters is really actually quite unique.

(Speaker 2)
kind of convincing me to change the atmosphere of my offices, even though they’re traditional CPA practices. The static, non -inviting environment. Here, I want to come back. When I came here, a few weeks ago, I couldn’t wait to come back. Clay’s presentation training style is really like nothing I’ve seen before.

(Speaker 2)
Most business seminars I’ve gone to, suit and tie, very, you know, try to stay awake, drink a bunch of cups of coffee, but plays very entertaining. And the information he has is, I haven’t heard before, I’ve heard pieces of it, but the way he puts it together in a total package and his presentation style is both entertaining and very knowledgeable. Well, I guess what people are missing out if they don’t come to Thrive Conference is It depends on them. If they like working 60, 70 hours a week and barely getting by or making decent money, but you can’t replace your time, that’s fine. If you’re in a position like me, you make good money, but you’d like to buy back your time. You’d like to still make the money, but not have to show up, not have a business that’s dependent upon you showing up.

(Speaker 2)
Coming here, if you don’t come here, you’re not gonna get that. What we’re going to do today is we’re going to give you a little tour of the house that we just bought. In Oklahoma, this is what we call a big old house. So come on in and check this out. We bought this house about a year and a half ago, and we’ve been finishing it. It was partially constructed.

(Speaker 2)
And so everything’s under construction. So this is kind of a sneak preview for everybody. So follow me. This right here is the living room, family room, whatever you want to call it. It’s got a bar for watching football, of course. Go Cowboys.

(Speaker 2)
It’s got, you know, 50 -foot ceilings, windows out to the pool, really, really nice kitchen over here. We flew the vent hood in from Mexico. It was handmade. Let’s go this way. This is a really unique room. There’s a six -story tower in the middle of the house.

(Speaker 2)
Don’t know why. It’s got six rooms straight up top. You can go 85 feet. in the air, shoot deer, take pictures, whatever you want to do. See the sunrise, sunset. This will be a photography studio, actually.

(Speaker 2)
But you see, it’s got 25-, 30 -foot ceilings up here. We had to get a special permit. It’s got an elevator that goes up six floors. Normally in a residence, you can only get like a three or four story elevator. Again, just six rooms like this. On the third floor, I’m going to have, I suck at golf.

(Speaker 2)
I love golf, but I suck at golf. And we’re going to have a golf simulator up there so I can play golf for 30 minutes. I get mad and I can leave, but it’s all inside and air conditioned. Over here off of the photography studio, there’s actually a safe room. It’s all concrete walls. We had a steel door made for it, and so tornadoes come, or people we don’t really care, you know, whatever, it’s a safe room, we can come in, it’s gonna have security cameras and everything else in there built in.

(Speaker 2)
Now down this hall is my favorite room. Well, two favorite rooms. One, there is the pantry, and there’s a stairwell right there in the back of the pantry that actually leads from my bedroom. So if I want a snack in the middle of the night, come straight down from the bedroom. There are 109 interior doors here, 33 exterior doors, 25 ,000 square feet. It’s got five garages, different garages.

(Speaker 2)
This is the best room in the place. We teach success principles at Hood & Associates CPAs, and one of them is just to have balance between your personal life, your finances, your fitness, your friends, your family. And so for fitness, I’ve got this. I’ll spend a lot of time in here. And of course, right off here, again, it’s all under construction. There’s stuff everywhere.

(Speaker 2)
but about a 70 ,000 gallon swimming pool. It’s got a swim jet, so you can exercise against the current, or it can make waves. It’s got a huge hot tub, two places you can stand, and it’ll massage you from your neck to your back. You know, because when you’re out being successful, making money, you get kind of tensed up. It’s got a layout shelf, a walk -in, a beach entry. And water shooting everywhere.

(Speaker 2)
It’s got about eight different waterfalls. It’s got a cave in it. It’s got a little lazy river, a little lake thing, pond thing up on top where you can lay out and play in the water. So, you know, all the necessities of life. Now we’re on the second floor. This is the master suite.

(Speaker 2)
It’s actually two stories and has three staircases to the second story. One over here, one there, and then one in another room. It’s got Five fireplaces in the whole house, just one here in the master. Second story, the master’s up there, which we’ll go up there in a minute. This is the master bathroom. Just a little bathroom.

(Speaker 2)
If you notice in the shower, there’s no knobs to turn the water on. Everything is digital. We have to have Wi -Fi for it, so it talks to your phone or a tablet. And you program it for Paul’s summer shower, Paul’s winter shower, or what have you. It also, in the top there, it’s got a deal that where if you want to take a shower in a thunderstorm, it has sound, lightning, thunder, all of that good stuff. I guess that’s the thing, take a shower in a thunderstorm.

(Speaker 2)
The bathtub is heated. It’s actually heated, not just the water, but it’s heated. And then over here is the bathroom and there’s two things in there. I know what that one does. That one is called a bidet. Does anybody know how to work a bidet?

(Speaker 2)
I don’t. This is the closet. One of them, I think there’s six closets, but this is, I don’t know how, this is probably a thousand square feet or give or take. All over here, keeps going over here. I don’t know who needs that many drawers, but apparently we do.

(Speaker 2)
This is the wife’s craft room. She likes to craft. We have grandkids and daughter -in -laws, and this will be full of stuff, and they’ll sit in here and make things and make memories. Of course, it’s off to the balcony. There’s a balcony off to the pool all the way around. Those of you that know me or that will get to know me know I like shoes, and so there’s tons of places to put my shoes in that closet.

(Speaker 2)
That’s what I’m excited about. The house has three laundry rooms. This is the master bedroom laundry room. This is just part of the master suite. So we do laundry right here. This is just a little storage room.

(Speaker 2)
You know, you gotta have a place to put suitcases and shoeboxes and stuff like that. Just a little extra thing. It’s wired for the smart home. So this is one of the brains. Now we’re circling back. If you get lost, we’re circling back to the master bathroom.

(Speaker 2)
Another closet. Right here’s that stairway I said that goes down to the the pantry in case I want a snack. This room here I’m excited about. This is, we have three grandkids and a fourth on the way. And the house is so big that if our grandkids come and stay with us, we want them to be close. So this is just like an extra bedroom attached to the master suite.

(Speaker 2)
Now let’s go upstairs to the second floor of the master. This is a stairway, one of the second or second of three stairways to the second floor. It’s actually third floor of the house, second floor of the master. We think we’re going to make this a slide because that right there when we just came in. was the grandkids bedroom. So they’re gonna be able to come up to our second floor, slide down into their bedroom.

(Speaker 2)
What do you think about that? I think that’s a necessity. This is the third story of the house, second story of the master bedroom. This room right here is kind of cool. It’s going to be like a little spa room. We’ve got a commercial tanning bed that goes in there and a massage chair and, you know, all the relaxing music and all of that.

(Speaker 2)
This would be like a library or reading room off of the master. It’s still part of the master. It’s got a separate balcony out there. Every room in the house is wired for speakers for entertaining. There’s a lot of speakers, I can tell you what, and they suck putting them up. I’d put a bunch of them up, but there’s a lot of them.

(Speaker 2)
These fans are really cool. They spin like this, and then the fans inside of them spin, so it’s got like three different motions going on at once. Okay, we’re now back on the second story of the house over by the tower. This is my office. This is where my office will be. And then we can go over here and you can see the second floor of the tower.

(Speaker 2)
Now, on the third floor of the tower, I’m going to put a golf simulator, like I said earlier, because I suck at golf, but I want to play. But you can see, we just got to keep our grandkids, because we have three granddaughters. They’ll be OK, but I have a grandson coming. And I know he’s going to want to be climbing. We’re going to have to be careful of that.

(Speaker 4)
This is a, this will be just an entertaining room, a game room.

(Speaker 2)
There’ll be a pool table here.

(Speaker 4)
Kids play Fortnite. Now over here is when you have a game room, you also got to have a place to have snacks. So this is our snack kitchen. This is one of three kitchens in the house.

(Speaker 31)
Like I say, there’s three laundry rooms, three kitchens.

(Speaker 4)
There are 13 bathrooms. This is kind of cool. But this is for entertaining. I was looking to learn how to take my business, like they’ve said today, from being very successful to being systematic.

(Speaker 2)
I’ve got a very successful practice in three different cities. I make good money. I just want to take it to the next level with systems and processes to where I can drive my cars more. Paul Hood, been a CPA for 33 years. And what kind of, um, growth have you and your great team had here over the past, let’s say five, six years. The last five, when I met you five years ago, we were doing 3 million this year.

(Speaker 2)
We’ll be, we’ll do 24 million, which is more than, which is more than, and he’s an accountant. So we’re going to talk about that. So Paul used me to Bob. Cause he said, there’s a guy that came into my office, looking to raise some capital.

(Speaker 4)
I think that was the thing.

(Speaker 2)
and he needed to get some sales going. And so if we tell Paul from the accounting perspective, I’ll pass the mic to you. You do accounting. Why do you have to have a website that makes sense and all that branding stuff? How has that impacted your brand having websites and all those branding things in place? Well, when I met you, like most CPAs, I thought my clients only come from referrals.

(Speaker 2)
But we get 500 leads in a two -month period every month just off of Google. And so this is my face.

(Speaker 18)
We have 17 offices across four states.

(Speaker 4)
We have them in every state. But this is, this is our face, like, like once you were since visual and it all, and it also has to say why we’re different, uh, that about us from there is spectacular. And it just, uh, it’s, it’s an industry that has changed. We’re, we’re modifying it. We’re going to, we’re going to, uh, we offer our services and, and a, a subscript model, uh, to where it’s all inclusive and, uh, just been awesome.

(Speaker 1)
We’ll determine the level of success. So success in business is not what you know how to do. It’s actually doing it. And so the thing that I would tell you is stop it. get get like this guy and let him go after it insane because then you can be doing what you do well and and take that that time and invest in something else on top of that top of that as contacts and i’m not this is not i don’t i don’t get anything for selling his just telling you what he’s done for us so that we could focus and then he’ll come in and And I’ll say, you know, I, you know, I think I’ve got it all. And he listens for five minutes and he makes, and he makes one and I want to slap myself in the face.

(Speaker 1)
Well, why didn’t I think about that’s idiotic. Um, but they’re sick freaks. They just get it, get it done. I don’t know. I think it’s merit based pay in our office. So the people here, like they get paid.

(Speaker 1)
So if we were taking on your account account and someone else to do this, but if you hired a different marketing company, I’m just giving you best practices. Do you want to make sure that they win when you win? It’s like in our office, if we grow Dave Basie’s podcast, that benefits our company, to the extent it benefits them, but we actually benefit if they benefit. Does that make sense to you? Hello, my name is Charles Kolaw with Kolaw Fitness. Today, I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark.

(Speaker 1)
Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry.

(Speaker 1)
He’s written books with like Lee Crockrell, head of Disney with the 40 ,000 cast members. He’s friends with like Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10 ,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day -to -day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top.

(Speaker 1)
He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. This guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks, he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks, he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 -step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multimillionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system.

(Speaker 1)
critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, like Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him.

(Speaker 1)
He cares about, where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. And that’s what I like the most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. And Clay has been an amazing business coach.

(Speaker 1)
Through the course of that, we became friends. I was really most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. And when we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal. And they were super excited about working with him.

(Speaker 1)
And he told me, he’s like, I’m not going to tell you it I’m gonna turn it down because he knew it was gonna harm the common good of people in the long run and the guy’s integrity just really wowed me it brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy his he doesn’t his highest desire was to do what’s right and Anyways, just just just an amazing man. So anyways impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate anytime I’ve got nervous or worried about how to run the company or, you know. navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for three months.

(Speaker 1)
And you have $350 ,000 of bills you’ve got to pay. And we have no accounts receivable.

(Speaker 30)
He helped us navigate that.

(Speaker 5)
And of course, we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. He’s a great man. I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing. And I encourage you, if you haven’t worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s going to help magnify you. And there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does.

(Speaker 5)
He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day, and literally the rest of the time he’s working. And he can outwork everybody in the room. every single day, and he loves it. So anyways, this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank you, Clay. And anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay, it’s a great, great opportunity to ever work with him.

(Speaker 5)
So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys. Bye -bye. driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little

(Speaker 5)
over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes. And then I met Clay, and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. Doing $800 million in sales over a 15 -year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of salespeople for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And, I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years.

(Speaker 5)
become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us. And it’s just been an incredible experience.

(Speaker 5)
I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builders shows.

(Speaker 5)
all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because The results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do.

(Speaker 6)
I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic. And as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town. And so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing.

(Speaker 6)
And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 -year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us. And I know if you give them a shot, I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1 ,800 % increase in our internet leads.

(Speaker 6)
Going from 10 a month to 180 a month, that would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about, and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it, because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick, and I am the founder of D. Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay -at -home mom for 12 years and my three kids started school and they were in school full time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide, what do I want to do?

(Speaker 6)
My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that, I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. My husband suggested real estate. He’s a home builder, so real estate and home building go hand in hand, and we just rolled with it.

(Speaker 8)
I love people. I love working with people. I love the building relationships. But one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things, the processes and the advertising and marketing. I knew that I did not have what I needed to make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time, and he and his team

(Speaker 8)
have been extremely instrumental and helping us build our brands help market our business our agents the homes that we represent everything that we do is a direct line from clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage our real estate brokerage eight months ago. And in that time we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents. But I have to give credit where credit’s due.

(Speaker 8)
And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision.

(Speaker 23)
When you dream big, big things happen.

(Speaker 8)
I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way. I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer to insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient, and that’s it.

(Speaker 9)
My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean, I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63 ,000 embezzlement.

(Speaker 9)
I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world.

(Speaker 4)
He was instrumental in helping with a specific level of care. plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web.

(Speaker 4)
With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. My name is Kevin Thomas and the name of our company is MultiClean. We are a commercial janitorial service and we serve the entire state of Oklahoma. and Kansas and soon to be Arkansas. We have probably grown probably five times.

(Speaker 4)
We’ve added, I think when we first started with you, we had 60 to 65 employees and now we have a little over 300 employees. Before we got involved with Thrive Time, we didn’t really have any systems or processes in place. I’ve probably been to Oh, in six, seven years, I’ve probably been to 12 to 13 business conferences. And amazingly, each time I go, I learn something new and I’m so excited to bring it back and show the team about marketing and how to implement. Okay, Aaron Antis, September 25th and 26th, guess who’s coming back to Tulsa? I will give you a hint.

(Speaker 4)
His first name is Eric and his last name is Trump. And his father is the 47th president of these United States. Yes, Eric Trump is joining us once again here, September 25th and 26th in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the two day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Growth Workshop. But Eric Trump is bringing friends. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Alina Haba will be joining Eric Trump right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(Speaker 5)
Amanda Grace will be in the place.

(Speaker 4)
Dr. Stella Emanuel.

(Speaker 11)
Well, we’ll be here in T town in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(Speaker 15)
Julie Green will be on the scene.

(Speaker 29)
Mel K will be here to say, Hey, Dave Scarlett from the his glory team will be here.

(Speaker 11)
It’s going to be a blasty blast right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you want to start or grow a super successful company, if you want to make your wallet great again, or make your wallet great for the first time, if you want to learn marketing systems, scaling, human resources, accounting, social media, branding, search engine optimization, sales training, financial showtime! 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 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, builds, 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 greatest brands on the planet from a business standpoint.

(Speaker 11)
I mean, who else has been able to create a brand like the Trump brand?

(Speaker 15)
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 10 years of him running it.

(Speaker 11)
And we get to tap into that knowledge. That’s going to be amazing. Now think about this for a second. But Clay Clark, man, he is one character.

(Speaker 15)
It’s a good word for character.

(Speaker 4)
Yeah, that is it. Good, driven, smart. And I’ve never met a guy who was so hyper all the time. He’s doing so much good. And then I met his mother and she just says, She just lets him be Clay Clark. I mean, so he’s endorsed by his mother and he’s doing magnificent work.

(Speaker 4)
So it was great meeting you out there and all the people that he surrounds himself with. His Clay Clark starts his days at five o ‘clock in the morning. Oh, it’s incredible. Yeah. He’s, he’s like, he’s, he’s a machine. He’s a machine.

(Speaker 4)
But his, you know, I could, I have problems with my company starting at nine o ‘clock. Yes. Hundreds of people showing up at 5 .00 AM in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Man, he’s a leader of a leader. He’s a fantastic young man. No, he is.

(Speaker 4)
The lineup continues to grow, and this is how we do our tickets here at the Thrive Time Show. If you want to get a VIP ticket, you can absolutely do it. It’s $500 for a VIP ticket. We’ve always done it that way.

(Speaker 28)
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.

(Speaker 4)
I grew up without money. I totally understand what it’s like to be in a tight spot. So if you want to attend, it’s $250 or whatever price you want to pay. That’s how I do it. And it’s $500 for a VIP ticket.

(Speaker 4)
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.

(Speaker 4)
Yeah.

(Speaker 27)
And I thought to myself, there’s no more room.

(Speaker 4)
I felt kind of bad that a couple of people the VIP seats in the men’s restroom. No, I’m just kidding.

(Speaker 5)
So I thought, you know what, we should probably add on. So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right?

(Speaker 4)
His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing. 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, you’ll request a ticket, boom.

(Speaker 4)
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.

(Speaker 26)
Just text my number.

(Speaker 4)
It’s my cell phone number, my personal cell phone number. We’ll keep that in mind.

(Speaker 25)
private between you, between you, me, everybody.

(Speaker 4)
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. 918 -851 -0102. I know we have a lot of Spanish speaking people that attend these conferences.

(Speaker 4)
And so to be bilingually sensitive, my cell phone number is 918 -851 -0102. That is not actually bilingual. That’s just saying Juan for a Juan. It’s not the same thing. I think you’re attacking me. Now, let’s talk about this.

(Speaker 4)
Now, what kind of stuff will you learn at the Thrive Time Show workshop? 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.

(Speaker 4)
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, I got to get my brand known out there like the Trump brand, right? You want to get that brand out there.

(Speaker 4)
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 of how you can do that. 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.

(Speaker 4)
We’re going to teach you search engine optimization, how to come up top in the search engine results. 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? Well, because first of all, you either have great people or you have people who suck.

(Speaker 4)
And so it could be a challenge, you know, learning how to work with a large group of people and get everybody pulling in the same direction can be a challenge. 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.

(Speaker 24)
When you start with the people who have a great attitude, they’re teachable, they’re driven, all of those things, then you can get those people all pulling in the same direction.

(Speaker 4)
So we’re going to teach you branding, marketing, sales, search engine optimization. We’re going to teach you accounting. 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?

(Speaker 4)
How do you build an organization if you’re not organized? 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. But let me tell you how the format is set up here. And again, folks, this is a two day

(Speaker 4)
interactive 15. Think about this, folks. It’s two days. Each day, it starts at 7 a . m.

(Speaker 5)
, and it goes until 5 p .

(Speaker 4)
m. So from 7 a . m. to 5 p .

(Speaker 23)
m.

(Speaker 5)
, two days.

(Speaker 4)
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.

(Speaker 19)
So, Aaron, what kind of great stuff happens during that 15 -minute question -and -answer session after every teaching session?

(Speaker 4)
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 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.

(Speaker 4)
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. That’s 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 snow cone.

(Speaker 4)
I mean, there’s just… You had a crocodile one time. That was pretty interesting. I should write that down, and I can do that. Sorry for that one guy that we lost. The crocodile, we duct taped its face, so that, right?

(Speaker 4)
We duct taped. No, it was a baby crocodile. And we duct taped.

(Speaker 2)
Yeah, duct taped around the mouth so it didn’t bite anybody. But it was really cool passing that thing around and petting it.

(Speaker 22)
I should do that.

(Speaker 2)
I should.

(Speaker 4)
We have a small petting zoo that will be assembled.

(Speaker 2)
It’s going to be great. And then you’re in the company of hundreds of entrepreneurs.

(Speaker 4)
So there’s not a lot of people in America today. In fact, there’s less than 1 ,000 people million people today, according to US 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 three out of every 100 people in America that are self -employed to begin with. And when Inc.

(Speaker 4)
Magazine reports that 96 % of businesses fail by default, By default, you have a 1 out of 1 ,000 chance of succeeding in the game of business. But yet the average client that you and I work with, we can typically double this. No hyperbole, no exaggeration. I have thousands of testimonials to back this up. 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.

(Speaker 4)
And you say, double? Yeah, there’s businesses that we have tripled.

(Speaker 5)
There’s businesses we’ve grown 8x.

(Speaker 4)
There’s so many examples you can see. see it thrivetimeshow . com. But again, this is the most interactive best business workshop on the planet. This is objectively the highest rated and most reviewed business workshop on the planet. I was looking to learn how to take my business like they’ve said today from being very successful to being systematic.

(Speaker 4)
I’ve got a very successful practice in three different cities, make good money, just want to take it to the next level with systems and processes to where I can drive my cars more. Paul Hood. been a CPA for 33 years. And what kind of growth have you and your great team had here over the past, let’s say five, six years. The last five, when I met you five years ago, we were doing 3 million. This year we’ll be, we’ll do 24 million.

(Speaker 4)
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 have, we cater in the food. and because.

(Speaker 4)
I keep it simple. I literally bring in the same food both days for lunch. It’s Ted Esconzito’s, an incredible Mexican restaurant. That’s going to happen. And Jill Donovan, our good friend, who is the founder of Rustic Cuff. She started that company in her home, and now she sells millions of dollars of apparel and products.

(Speaker 4)
That’s rusticcuff . com.

(Speaker 12)
And someone says, I want more. This is not enough. Give me more. OK. 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 giving me a verbal.

(Speaker 7)
to be here.

(Speaker 21)
And this is a guy who’s one of the wealthiest people in Oklahoma.

(Speaker 20)
And nobody really knows who he is because he’s built systems that are very utilitarian that offer a lot of value.

(Speaker 4)
He’s made a lot of money in the it’s the it’s where you rent.

(Speaker 5)
It’s short.

(Speaker 19)
It’s where you’re renting storage spaces.

(Speaker 18)
He’s a storage space guy.

(Speaker 4)
He owns this. What do we call that? The rental, the storage space, storage units. This guy owns storage units. He owns railroad cars. He owns a lot of assets that make money on a daily basis.

(Speaker 17)
But they’re not like 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.

(Speaker 4)
Most people don’t know who owns the railroad cars. But this guy, he’s giving me a verbal that he will be here and we just continue to add more and more success stories.

(Speaker 16)
So if you’re out there today and you want to change your life, you want to give yourself an incredible gift, You want a life changing experience.

(Speaker 4)
You want to learn how to start and grow a company.

(Speaker 16)
Go to Thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 4)
com. Go there right now. Thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 16)
com. Request a ticket for the two day interactive event. Hey, how’s it going? I’m Thomas Crosson, owner and founder of Full Package Media in Dallas, Texas. I’ve been a coaching client with Clay Clark since the beginning of our business. We started about a year ago, August of last year.

I had no clients, no idea what we were doing, no clue. really what was going on, and now we’ve grown to where we’ve got six photographers, we’ve got office space here, I have an admin sales person that works for us full time, developing an online system, and a lot of that growth we attribute to Clay helping us, and there’s so many things that, I mean his stuff is not revolutionary, it’s not this crazy walk on hot coals and all this stuff, it’s just real, Real stuff. It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. It is life -changing. If you become a jade smoker, it is life -changing. 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.

And reminding you and inviting you to come out to the two -day interactive Thrivetimeshow workshop right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I promise you, it will be a life -changing experience. We can’t wait to see you right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Whoa. What kind of growth have you had since you and I’ve been working together over these past few years? 3 .45 million.

I got those stats before I got on here. So you’ve grown by 3 .45 million? Yeah. 3 million, 450 ,000. Would that be like if you took the combined revenue, maybe doubled it? Or have we gone up by a half?

Almost three, not quite.

Transcribed with Cockatoo