Online Business | How to Grow a Thriving Online Business | Celebrating the EPIC Success of IronBullBumpers.com Including a 76% Increase In Online Leads, 640% Return On Investment & 19% Year Over Year Growth Rate

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

(Speaker 1)
All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, I’m gonna introduce you to a wonderful client who has been a pleasure to work with, and his company is ironbullbumpers .

(Speaker 71)
com.

(Speaker 1)
That’s ironbullbumpers . com. He’s a real person. He’s not a male model. He could be a male model, but he’s not a male model. Steele, welcome onto the Thrive Time Show.

(Speaker 70)
How are you, sir?

(Speaker 1)
Good, good. How you doing, Clay? Well, I’m excited to talk to you.

(Speaker 11)
What made you decide to get into the iron bull bumpers business and not to become a male model? Hmm, you know, I like welding too much metal stuff, steel, you know.

(Speaker 1)
That was my dad’s company that he started. What do you guys provide there? I’ll pull up the website.

(Speaker 69)
What are the products and services that you guys provide there at ironbullbumpers .

(Speaker 11)
com? So mainly we make custom built, once ready steel bumpers for trucks. So basically any truck from 1973 to present day, we make trucks or bumpers for the trucks. And then there are a variety of custom options they could add on.

(Speaker 1)
So they’re all built to order and do take time to be built, but they’re made specifically for that customer’s vehicle and what they want on it.

(Speaker 3)
And for anybody out there that wants to Google you to verify you’re a real company, can you tell us your first and last name and the name of your company?

(Speaker 1)
My name is Steel Baldwin, and the company is Iron Bull Bumpers. Were you named after the bumpers? Like Steel Baldwin, Steel Bumpers? Is there a type of connection there?

(Speaker 11)
Was your dad that upset? No, no, no. He was just told he’s basically been a welder since he was 18. So I think part of that. Do you have a brother or sister named by the name of like Blowtorch or…

(Speaker 1)
No, unfortunately, no aluminum or no wood. Now, we’ve had the opportunity to work with you for a while, and I’m looking at my stat sheet here.

(Speaker 11)
You guys have seen a 640 % return on investment.

(Speaker 1)
Is that accurate, sir? Yes, yes. And I understand you’re up a total of 63 % in all leads, like the number of leads you’re getting is up 63%.

(Speaker 11)
Can you tell us about that?

(Speaker 1)
In just the increased leads, there is more qualified ones, so that’s always great. Now, Sean said so far, year to date, you’re up 19 % this year versus last year.

(Speaker 11)
Is that accurate? Correct. You know, if you’re an online based business, especially a business like ours, where it’s a product business, so it’s not a service per se. So it’s an actual tangible thing that you have to wait, you know, could be a month before you get it. So you want some kind of like a safety to know that you’re actually going to get the thing, you know, to know that the company is actually a real company, considering that you got to pre pay before you get it. So for, nowadays in the internet, you can make your company as professional as you want on a website and you can appear as big as you want on a website and still be a small crew.

(Speaker 11)
But having social proof actually makes people have confidence that they know they’re gonna get the product that they actually ordered. So it’s just that other step, a good website is the first step, but having social proof of people actually getting the stuff.

(Speaker 1)
I’m just kind of seals a deal.

(Speaker 11)
Having worked with Sean and our team now for a while, what would you say to anybody out there that’s that’s on the fence about hiring our team to help guide them down the path? Just do it. You know, you just if you feel like you need a little kick or something, this is the kick you need. And to realize that the things that you may be thinking about doing, but maybe don’t know how to do it, or just need that little, or even just need that little reminder throughout the week of what you really need to be doing throughout the week. Instead of bouncing around, you need a little more focus. And they do provide that.

(Speaker 1)
Sean was great for us. Tracking the results. I think most business owners don’t have a way in which they track. And again, anywhere you track, you’re going to slack. You have to measure what you treasure.

(Speaker 1)
I repeat, it kind of rhymes, but we have to measure what you treasure and you’re always going to slack where you don’t track. How much has it helped you tracking and seeing the numbers every week? Like this is the number of leads. This is where we’re ranking on Google. This is how much we’re spending on ads.

(Speaker 11)
Seeing that all in kind of one place. Oh, it’s great. Cause now I can figure out like there actually is like some like a rhythm, like things that just kind of always happen or kind of you can start to expect seeing some of the numbers each week laid out. You can actually not be so worried like, oh, am I going to get enough sales this week? Because you can kind of do the law of averages and be like, well, I should expect at least this just from just from previous weeks, and you can start to see the growth. And it kind of gives you, you know, as a business owner, a little more peace of mind throughout the week.

(Speaker 11)
If you if you have been kind of struggling or thinking you’re not making enough during a week or something like that, and you know that that can put a big drain on your head at the beginning of the week.

(Speaker 1)
So if you kind of can have yourself more open minded throughout the week, it helps you get a lot more productive and kind of hit the ground running. How much has it impacted you knowing that you have a coach that’s helping you, but also knowing it’s at a flat rate? You know, knowing that if we update the website or we’re working on graphic design or some sort of digital marketing for you, that that’s all included. You’re not charged per call, per hour, per print piece.

(Speaker 11)
How much has that impacted you knowing that it’s a flat monthly fee? I think it just gives you more of a peace of mind. And just that you’re actually there to help, you know, when you get that hourly rate, you’re like, nickel and dime you to death. And you’re like, I don’t really want to talk to this person sometimes. I don’t know if it’s something like that, or if it’s just like, you know, you feel like you’re just helping them pay their payroll.

(Speaker 11)
I guess that we consider them really helping you. You know, you can’t just, some of those places that are like that, you can’t just talk to them.

(Speaker 1)
Just for a simple question, they’re always got to be back on the clock kind of thing. Also, you know, our program, our average client is with us for six years or longer, but it is month to month.

(Speaker 11)
How much did that factor into you deciding to hire us or your family deciding to hire us knowing that what we do is month to month? Again, it just kind of gets the pressure off of you and just makes it easier for you to want to jump in. You know, some of these places in previous years that we talked to, yeah, you got a contract and you’re kind of locked in with them. So if you don’t like what they’re doing, you kind of have to force them. to do it the way that you might see fit or, you know, you’re kind of stuck with them and then you just keep having this expense that you maybe don’t like.

(Speaker 1)
So this kind of just, again, makes it easier just to jump in. Steel, I really do appreciate you carving out time for us. I encourage everyone, check out that website. That’s ironbullbumpers . com, ironbullbumpers . com.

(Speaker 11)
Steel, thank you so much for carving out time for us.

(Speaker 1)
And we’ll talk to you soon.

(Speaker 11)
All right.

(Speaker 1)
Thanks, Clay. Bye -bye.

(Speaker 13)
Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the grill gun. One of the gentlemen, his name is Bob Healey, came to our conference with a quasi -functional prototype. He had terminal cancer, and Bob came to me and said, help me.

(Speaker 1)
Entrepreneur Clay Clark has built several multi -million dollar businesses. Now, he helps budding entrepreneurs like Bob turbocharge their ideas with a 14 -step plan.

(Speaker 13)
And at grillblazer .

(Speaker 1)
a massively successful company that’s becoming a household name in many American homes. In In this episode, we dive into how to rebuild American small businesses and industrial capacity. You never want to outsource your core competence.

(Speaker 13)
We have to import certain technology from countries that hate us to make military weapons to defend us.

(Speaker 2)
That doesn’t even make sense.

(Speaker 1)
This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

(Speaker 2)
Clay Clark, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Hey, thank you for being here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So this current administration is looking to revitalize the economy, to push it to a next level. And for me, always small business has been a centerpiece of this. Some people describe it as the engine of American innovation and growth and so forth.

(Speaker 1)
But during the COVID years, just we’re emerging out of them as we speak, a lot of small business was frankly wiped out. And you’re the guy who’s actually helping people kind of build those small businesses. So tell me about what you do. Well, in America today, we have approximately 330 million Americans that live here, and we have 9 .2 million Americans that identify as being self -employed. And so what happens is somebody out there, a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a plumber, somebody says, I want to start my own business. And when they do, they don’t really know the proven processes to start and grow a company.

(Speaker 1)
And that’s what I do. So I basically take somebody with a dream, and I align them with my team, and we help them scale some things.

(Speaker 5)
something to humans on the planet Earth in exchange for a profit.

(Speaker 13)
That’s what we helped people to scale.

(Speaker 1)
You’ve structured your business in such a way that it’s actually, unless your client does well, it’s impossible for you to do well. And I thought to myself, what a brilliant way, what an ethical way to set up a business because you kind of have no choice. Well, you know, the word shalom, which Pastor Jackson, I go to Sheridan Church, and Pastor Jackson talks about that word from time to time, shalom. But the shalom is like a win -win. It’s a win -win relationship, a mutually beneficial relationship. Napoleon Hill, the bestselling author, Think and Grow Rich, calls it the mutually beneficial relationship.

(Speaker 1)
And so what I do is I coach a client or work with a client. I tell the client, hey, look, I’m going to help you grow your business for the smallest monthly fee possible. And I just want to get a small percentage of the growth. Because if I’m getting one percentage point of the growth, Theoretically, you’re making 100 times more than I am. But if I can scale multiple companies, it turns out to be a great thing for me. So I’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years.

(Speaker 1)
And so what I’ll do is I’ll sit down with an electrician, and the electrician will have a business that’s stuck. It’s not thriving. It’s barely surviving, and they go, I don’t know how to grow. I don’t know if it’s marketing. I don’t know if it’s human resources. I don’t know if it’s accounting.

(Speaker 1)
I don’t know if it’s pricing. I don’t know if it’s me. I don’t know if it’s the economy. How do I grow my company? And I sit down with them, and I say, look, we’re going to go through a 14 -step plan to rejuvenate, to revive, to bring life into your business.

(Speaker 2)
And I’m going to get a small percentage of the growth. And you’re going to be rich, and I’m going to be doing very well if this works.

(Speaker 13)
Tell me a little bit about your background.

(Speaker 1)
And one thing that I, you know, made me aware of you is that during these COVID years, when a lot of small businesses were basically closed and many permanently, the companies you worked with actually all stayed open. And so just tell me a little bit about how that happened and a little bit about where you come from too, because that’s connected. And I apologize for everybody watching this that I speak fast. I used to stutter as a kid. OK, so my synapses go really fast. So you might have to watch this in slow -mo.

(Speaker 1)
But I knew that the Constitution is not a suggestion and the Constitution cannot be suspended because of a pandemic. That’s something I knew. Also, the Bible, I happen to be a Christian. Hebrews 10, 25 tells us to not forsake the gathering even as we draw closer to the end. So theoretically, as we’re getting closer to the end of time, God is the alpha, the omega, the beginning and the end for all the Christians out there.

(Speaker 1)
We’re not supposed to stop gathering. So I knew that the pandemic couldn’t temporarily suspend the constitution. I knew that the Bible tells us to not forsake the gathering. And so to me, it was a no brainer to stay open. Also, I have this controversial business theory I was telling you off camera a little bit, but it’s hard to be open if your business is closed. And so I really leaned into my clients and I said, clients, listen, doctors, dentists, pizzerias, home remodelers, look, the models that said 2 .2 million people would die from COVID, those are false.

(Speaker 1)
Those are made by Neil Ferguson, the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute. Whether they were wrong intentionally or accidentally, they’re wrong. The PCR tests, the polymerase chain reaction tests, Those can be misused, misconstrued to inflate cases. And COVID is 100 % treatable with Budesonide, Ivermectin, and Hydroxychloroquine. And a lot of my clients were going, how do you know this? And I’m going, well, a third of my clients are in the medical field.

(Speaker 1)
So I’m working with doctors, Dr. Rashid Batar, may he rest in peace, client of mine, Dr. Zelenko, These are friends of mine, may he rest in peace. And they knew the models were false, the PCR tests are false, the treatments are real. However, the media, outside of One American News, Epoch, and a handful of media outlets, they were just telling everybody, we need a lockdown, we need to temporarily suspend the Constitution. And to me, that was analogous to laying on the train tracks to see if it was safe while the trains approaching quickly and will certainly kill us if we don’t move. It’s like a case study of if we lay on the train tracks as the train runs over us, we’ll see if that’ll help. We’ll see if locking down, shutting down, quarantining will help.

(Speaker 1)
Will that stop the spread? And I knew that it’s going to start the spread of COVID. is what it’s going to do because then people are going to be sitting around looking for government handouts. I told my clients, stay open. Be the purple cow in the field of brown cows, to quote Seth Godin, the marketing guru. Stay open.

(Speaker 1)
You’ll be the only company that’s open in your market. Shaw Homes is a home building company we’ve worked with for years. We started with them, they were at 14 million of revenue, shawhomes . com. And before they sold the company, we got them up to $150 million of revenue. Not overnight success kind of growth, but I mean, a tremendous amount of growth had to do with the fact they stayed open.

(Speaker 1)
You know, pizzerias I worked with, they stayed open.

(Speaker 2)
And so again, if you’re watching today’s show and you say, what can I do with this information?

(Speaker 5)
The next pandemic, the next scamdemic, the next plandemic, whatever that is, it cannot temporarily suspend the constitution and locking down won’t stop the spread of COVID or some other virus.

(Speaker 1)
What it will do is it will start the spread of communism. So, you know, Pastor Jackson Laumeyer, Also in Tulsa, I was speaking with him earlier, and the thing that made him realize that there’s something amiss with this closing of churches is right across the street, he had a Home Depot, if I recall correctly, a strip club, and one other kind of business that I can’t remember, but all of which were open and with tons of people going in 24 -7 in many cases.

(Speaker 62)
And he’s thinking to himself, my church is supposed to be closed here, and I’m only doing this once a week.

(Speaker 5)
Well, okay, within four miles or five miles of Sheridan Church, which is a Tulsa -based church, there is an adult club, as he mentioned, a strip club.

(Speaker 1)
There was a liquor store. These places are all – Yeah, that’s right. It was a liquor store was the other show. They were all open. Dr. Deborah Brooks came out and actually said on camera that the models were false and that that number was off by 25 times. So my wife is about five foot three.

(Speaker 1)
You guys have met her. That would be like me telling you my wife is 125 feet tall. thus you need to renovate your offices because she’s going to come visit. I mean, the jackassery of being off by 25 times, that should have stopped the pandemic to begin with. Then those PCR tests, Kerry Mullis, may he rest in peace, the inventor of the PCR tests, he actually on camera said multiple times, that a polymerase chain reaction test, a PCR test, should not be used to test something like COVID.

(Speaker 13)
And he explained how his tests can be misused and miscalibrated. And the Constitution is the law, or it’s not. It’s not a suggestion, and it cannot be temporarily suspended because of a scandemic.

(Speaker 2)
It’s interesting because you say pandemic, but really, we’re talking about the response, the way that we as a society dealt with a pandemic, because there was a virus, and it did go around.

(Speaker 1)
But how we deal with it is the whole story, actually. So let’s go back to small business. Seeing as you’re tracking the realities of small business as part of your work, how much of an impact did the whole COVID policies thing have on the small businesses, really? Well, the average small business that I work with, when people come to me and they say, could you help me grow my company? We do what was called a 14 point analysis. Okay, so, Jan, if I was talking to you and you were a business owner, I would go over, okay, what are your goals?

(Speaker 1)
What do your finances look like? What does your marketing look like? What does your branding look like? And we go through that sort of a business colonoscopy kind of thing. We discover that the average small business owner has about two and a half weeks of payroll on hand. or two and a half weeks of operating capital on hand, or maybe a little more than half a month of operating capital, meaning that if you’re a pizzeria, you’re a doctor, you’re a dentist, you could afford to be closed for a week and then another week before you would start to have some serious cash flow problems.

(Speaker 1)
And cash to a business is like blood to a human, oxygen to a human, water to a fish. It’s essential to survive. And so by doing two weeks to stop the spread what you did was you verified that every business would be dead. And I’m not just saying that because it rhymes, but two weeks to stop the spread was like verifying that every business would be dead. And so my wife and I, and a lot of my longtime clients, we had built up fortification and cashflow fortification so we could withstand lean times.

(Speaker 1)
But most people that I knew couldn’t. And so our podcast oftentimes will have a million listeners a month. And I was getting text messages from listeners saying, I own a business. How am I supposed to feed my family if I’m closed for two weeks? So right now, if you go to usdebtclock . org and you look at it, we’ve got approximately under 3 % of the American population that’s self -employed.

(Speaker 1)
And according to Inc Magazine, by default, 96 % of businesses fail anyway. 96%, according to Inc Magazine, fail within 10 years. So you’ve got a 1 out of 1 ,000 shot of achieving success as a small business owner by default anyway. And you add into that lockdowns, Quarantines, curfews, think about the emotional chaos that creates in a company. A small business is like a family. So half of my staff at my hair business wanted to stay open.

(Speaker 1)
Half of them were going, let’s stay open, let’s cut hair. The other staff is saying, let’s stay closed, I want to be safe. You transition to the remodeling company I’m involved in. Half of the employees wanted to stay open. The other half is saying, well, if we can basically not work for two weeks, I’ll call this a vacation.

(Speaker 13)
And so it created a division within companies too, where employees, some employees wanted to stay open, some wanted to stay closed. Some people were very concerned about the effectiveness of the treatments, some were not.

(Speaker 2)
And so it created dissension within organizations, it killed momentum, it killed rapport, it really was destructive for small business.

(Speaker 1)
I mean, that’s fascinating, kind of looking at it really from the inside. I mean, so, Even if the businesses did survive, they had to go through this extra chaos. I would just say I have a very intimate knowledge into the workings of the business. I’m on the phone with dentists who are saying, my front desk lady will come to work, but my front desk guy won’t. Dentists are telling me, my anesthesiologist, let’s say, for the oral surgeons, he’ll come to work, but the actual oral surgeon won’t.

(Speaker 1)
So the anesthesiologist will, but the surgeon won’t. I work with doctors that do knee replacements, doctors that do cosmetic surgeries of all different kinds. They’re going, I can’t find a hospital that’ll let my patient have the knee surgery, but I can find surgeons to work it. So it created this supply chain problem. The home builders I was working with, they could find framers to frame, but they couldn’t find tile guys to do the tile. So it created all sorts of disruption within the marketplace.

(Speaker 1)
Because not only did you have to make a decision as an owner whether to keep your business open, but then you had to educate your employees from a position of weakness. Because these doctors, dentists, and lawyers, they don’t claim to be experts on pandemics. they claim to be experts in their given field. So it really was probably the most turbulent time to have a business, run a business, own a business. However, because I have a close -knit relationship with my clients, we were able to keep it going. And to quote John Lee Dumas, he has a podcast called EOFire .

(Speaker 1)
com. And John Lee Dumas is a friend of mine, and he says to me, you’re going to go ahead and have your business conference? during the pandemic?” And I go, oh yeah. And I’m mangling the quote, but he said something to the effect of, well, I don’t think you have a lot of competition.

(Speaker 13)
And so our business conference was booming.

(Speaker 5)
And one of our, there was a literary agent who represents some of the biggest authors in the world.

(Speaker 1)
She told me she flew to our conference she was the only person on the plane. How do you actually figure out who you’re going to work with? Because with your particular model, it’s clear you can’t It’s not that anybody who wants to work with you can because you have to make your decisions about who you think has potential because you’re going to be on the hook for it. Well, when you got a chance to kind of shadow me a little bit off camera, I do a lot of the video editing myself. I do a lot of the web development myself.

(Speaker 1)
I do a lot of the accounting myself.

(Speaker 42)
So I’m very much hands on.

(Speaker 1)
And so I like to keep a group of around 160 clients I work with. And I do these free assessments. And the reason why I do a free 13 point assessment is I just want to see, are we going to have a shalom or a win -win relationship? Can I? And there’s three things I’m looking for. Do you actually solve a problem or do you provide a product or a service that the marketplace would benefit from?

(Speaker 1)
So if somebody’s selling something that I think is ethically a foul or against my Christian morals, I’m not going to work with them. So thing number one is Do you sell a product or service that I actually think is ethical, legal, that kind of thing? And you’d be surprised how many people are selling illegal things that won’t help doing it. So step number two is, does the person actually identify with the worldviews that I have? If I’m going to sit there and debate about the Constitution or capitalism, that’s probably not the thing. So one is, do we have a product or service that we can actually help you scale?

(Speaker 1)
Two is, is the person ideologically aligned with me? And then three is, is, you know, Is it realistic? We want to be able to set these SMART goals. I call them SMART goals. They’re S -M -A -R -T. I’m quoting Brian Tracy, best -selling author, but a SMART goal is a specific goal.

(Speaker 1)
It’s a measurable goal. It’s something that’s actionable. You can actually take action and do it. It’s realistic and it’s time -sensitive. S -M -A -R -T. Is it specific?

(Speaker 1)
Is it measurable? Is it actionable? Is it realistic? Is it time -sensitive? If I can help somebody grow a company and I can see a clear path to getting there, there, it is exciting, Jan, when you know, wow, this person’s business is struggling.

(Speaker 1)
and I can help them scale. So I think about Papa Gallo’s Pizzeria in Florida. We’ve helped this couple grow. They’ve opened three restaurants. So since I’ve started working with them, we’ve opened up restaurant two and three. They’ve grown their business five -fold.

(Speaker 1)
I think about shawhomes . com from 14 million to 150 million. I think about companies like Oxifresh, where I’ve had a role in advising them. They’re now up to 500 locations. Beverly Hills Precious Metals, here’s my precious metals dealer that I’ve worked with for years. And to watch him scale his company, I just, that never gets old to me.

(Speaker 1)
You know, it’s like infinitely exciting to help someone achieve their goals. So that’s really. What gets me excited, and then growing up poor or without money, I’m sure there’s somebody watching this who grew up more poor, but my dad was working at a gas station, working the night shift. My dad was delivering pizzas for Domino’s. May he rest in peace in his late 30s. He’s in his late 30s, he’s delivering pizzas, he’s working at a gas station.

(Speaker 1)
He has a college degree from Oral Roberts University. That wasn’t a reverse shout out to ORU, but that’s a fact. But yet he didn’t know how to financially help our family thrive, but he had the work ethic. I appreciate him being willing to work those two jobs. Whenever I talk to that new potential client, I picture it like I’m talking to a 37 -year -old version of my dad. My dad’s no longer with us.

(Speaker 1)
He passed away from Lou Gehrig’s, but that’s how I look at it. I can’t communicate it with enough sincerity or passion, but every person I talk to on the phone who wants to become a client or wants to come to a conference, I pretend in my mind—maybe it’s not healthy, maybe it is—that that’s the 37 -year -old version of my father, and that’s what I look for.

(Speaker 13)
But someone who wants the hand out? Yeah, no. I don’t want to do that. But that person needs a hand up. That’s who I try to work with. Again, I just want to come back to this.

(Speaker 13)
This is what dawned on me, that I think you built your business to have

(Speaker 1)
to only have the people that want the hand up, because it’s just not going to work with the other people. You’re not going to be successful. That’s a great alignment of incentives. That’s what I’m trying to say here. Think and Grow Rich. Napoleon Hill.

(Speaker 1)
That book changed my life, and I encourage everyone to read it. There are three big principles I got out of that. One is the idea that only engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. We should never leech on our fellow man. We should never be looking for a handout. We should never be looking to the government.

(Speaker 1)
We should try to have a win -win with the marketplace. The second is we want to over deliver. Can we exceed the expectations of our clients, of our buyers? Can we exceed the expectations of our customers? And then the third is you want to surround yourself with people that have a similar goal and vision for their life. And so clients of mine, when they are clients, they also get to come to a workshop every couple of months.

(Speaker 1)
And so that’s where I get to meet people like Eric Trump. Eric Trump comes to our workshops and the average mechanic, doctor, dentist, lawyer, home remodeler, plumber, they’re going, I’m in a room with 300 people and one of them is Eric Trump. Trump, this is incredible. Or they’ll say, wow, there’s 300 people in this room and one of them is an NBA coach. I’m in a room with 300 people and Tim Tebow is one of them. And so there’s something that happens when you’re in a small, intimate setting and you’re surrounded with 300 entrepreneurs, some of which are household names.

(Speaker 1)
There’s a whole different level of electricity and of learning and of interaction that happens. And that’s really the environment we try to create.

(Speaker 13)
We want to help people create their own virtual mastermind, their own community of people that have that energy. I’m not Amish.

(Speaker 1)
But as I study the Amish, I know they’re very intentional about their community, and I can just tell you we were very intentional about the community. that we’ve built here. Tell me about your background. You did grow up in a humble situation, but you had some very interesting pivots along the way. Well, this is what happened. I’m a kid that stuttered.

(Speaker 1)
My dad’s working two jobs, working at the gas station, quick trip, and working delivering pizzas. My mom’s doing what she can do. And it occurred to me, and I don’t remember the exact moment, Jan, but I remember that kind of era of my life, thinking to myself, we’re poor. Although we don’t care about money, every decision was somehow impacted based upon money. And I thought to myself, 12 -year -old self, 13 -year -old self, I’m gonna find a way to make copious amounts of money so therefore I can focus on other things. Because for anybody who spends any amount of time with me, there’s three things I’m always doing.

(Speaker 1)
I’m always writing songs. I’m always writing books. And I’m always writing business plans. So I get into that kind of stuff. But you can’t afford to write songs that very few people listen to unless you have the time to do it. So I set out on this quest to create time freedom and financial freedom.

(Speaker 1)
So out of my parents’ basement, I started a company called DJ Connection. Back in the day, it was called C &G DJ Service. And it was called G because the youth pastor That mentored me who he was old enough to drive a car see I couldn’t drive a car And so the guy who drove me to my gigs was my youth pastor and he lost a bet and shaved a G Into his very hairy chest for some reasons. I don’t understand. So it was C and G DJ service named off of that And then I basically started cold -calling schools. I’m a 14 year old kid 15 year old kid cold -calling schools saying hi I Who DJs your school dance?

(Speaker 1)
Who’s in charge of organizing the school dance? And they would say, oh, that’s the PTA, or that’s the Booster Club, or that’s the parent sponsors. And I say, hey, I’d love to DJ your school dance, and I’ll do it for $1. And you can just pay me after the event what you think it’s worth. Well, a lot of people do. infinitely disappointed in their disc jockeys.

(Speaker 1)
And so I started getting some gigs. I started doing two gigs a month. three gigs a month. I needed equipment. I was selling the gigs, but I didn’t have any equipment. So I found a pothead by the name of Oswald and I rented equipment from him.

(Speaker 1)
This is a true story. And I thought to myself, I probably don’t want to be renting equipment from potheads. I probably need to have a more viable. This is my 14, 15 year old mind. So I got a job working poured concrete and I got a job working at the Norseman restaurant and I got a job working as a home health aide. So I had three jobs simultaneously.

(Speaker 1)
That was my pro tip for getting rich quick. And I took every dime I had, and I just kept buying more speakers, more sound, more lights. The speakers I bought were called JBL TR -225s, and these were like $500 a piece. And I tell you this because I was making $8 an hour. So if you’re making $8 an hour, you’ve got to work 70 hours to buy a speaker. you know, before taxes.

(Speaker 1)
So like, you know, you got to work 80 hours per speaker. So I had three jobs. I’m working these three jobs. Eventually, I decided to go to college early because in Minnesota, if you have enough credits, you can go to college early. So I went to St. Cloud State, and I picked classes, you know, graphic design, language, accounting, things that I thought would help me on my career. And then I transferred to Oral Roberts University.

(Speaker 1)
And at that point, I changed the name from C &G DJ Service. to DJ Connection. And then over time, I started getting into weddings.

(Speaker 68)
And before I sold the company, we were doing 4 ,000 weddings a year, which is 80 weddings a weekend, by the way.

(Speaker 1)
So think about all the vans, the lights, the mic stands, the speaker stands, the lighting equipment, all the people training these people. And then I started this thing called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which was a big bridal show. And I started one of the region’s largest wedding photography companies called epicphotos . com. And what happened is the fathers of the bride would pull me aside and they would say, I’m a dentist.

(Speaker 1)
Could you help me grow my business? Hey, I’m a doctor. Could you help me? Hey, I have a hardware store. Could you help me? And I won this thing called the SBA Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the state of Oklahoma.

(Speaker 1)
I also was the City of Tulsa Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the chamber when I was 20. And I was the state’s Entrepreneur of the Year when I was 27. And I kept winning these awards. And every time I would win awards, people would say, can I pick your brain? And then my wife would say, I give her credit. My wife says, what if you said yes instead of saying no, and you just charged him a small percentage of the growth?

(Speaker 1)
And I’m going, I don’t know. I like DJing quite a bit. So I kind of put that idea in the back burner. And then one by one, more and more people kept being more and more persistent, asking if I could help them.

(Speaker 13)
And I first started working with Maytag University, and I’m working with Hewlett Packard, and I’m working with some bigger companies that are bringing me in to speak. And I kept being asked and asked, and eventually we found ourselves 160 clients.

(Speaker 2)
And that was almost 20 years ago.

(Speaker 1)
So I’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years, and I love it. That’s interesting. They would actually bring you in to speak, but then somehow that would turn into some kind of business relationship as well. Because you were this budding entrepreneur, they wanted you as an inspirational speaker or something? The way it would work is like Hewlett -Packard, as an example. There’s a lady by the name of Anitra, a great event planner, by the way.

(Speaker 1)
Anitra, if you’re watching, big shout out to you. Anitra calls me and says, I work with Maytag University, and they’d like a speaker to come in to teach time management and sales. And I’ve watched some of your videos online, some of your samples, and I’d love to have you come speak. Could you do it? And most speakers charge per hour. Jan, they charge per hour.

(Speaker 1)
It’s like, you know, $10 ,000 for 90 minutes. Again, Napoleon Hill, I can hear it in my head, overdeliver, overdeliver. So I would tell these event planners, for me, you get me unlimited time for two days. Not just per hour, unlimited time for two days. Any subject that you want me to talk about, I’ll do it.

(Speaker 1)
If anybody bails out, I’ll speak. If you have a guest speaker that cancels, I’ll fill in. I’m working for Maytag University. The United States Government Accountability Office brought me in to speak. And I’m at the Anatole Hotel speaking to that group. And I think two of the speakers canceled.

(Speaker 1)
So I had three gigs, three speaking slots at the same event. And I kept being known as this is the guy who’s bringing comedy and entertainment to education. I was a former disc jockey, which is like one level lower than a carny in terms of the entertainment hierarchy. I was this DJ entertainer who’s educating, and I call it edutainment. What happened is more and more of the attendees would say, hey, I own a Maytag local store, and I love what you talked about. Could you help me grow my business?

(Speaker 1)
I said, well, you just pay me $1 ,000 a month and a small percentage of your growth, and we’ll do it. They go, really? And I could usually help somebody double their revenue within 12 months. And then I’m speaking to Hewlett Packard, and I’m going, you know, this is corporate America. I don’t know that this is probably my best place here. But the event planner who booked me would call me and say, hey, I love what you’re doing.

(Speaker 1)
Could you help me grow my event planning business? And so it just kept happening where I was bumping into caterers, event planners, photographers, Farmers Insurance, I did a lot of work with their local agents. I’ve done a lot of work with state farm agents, not under the brand, but with the local agents, the local entrepreneurs. Franchises started bringing me in, UPS brought me in. Somehow I found myself being the keynote speaker for UPS Canada, and it was just a lot

(Speaker 13)
of fun, but I’ve got five kids.

(Speaker 1)
I figured I needed to create a scalable model where I could help people in a way that still allowed me to be a mentally and physically present father. That’s why I have the model I do now, and that’s why I don’t travel to do speaking events. I typically bring the events to me. I sat in on a number of your consultations. Basically, it’s business coaching, what you do, and with actually doing some of the work as well. You think about Bill Belichick. You think about Nick Saban.

(Speaker 1)
You think about Red Auerbach. You think about a great coach. What’s a coach doing? A coach is doing three things. They’re pushing someone to be their best. The second thing is a coach is giving you a plan.

(Speaker 1)
You know, for the NFL, they don’t say to each player, hey, why don’t you come up with your own plan? And then when we say hike, everyone go 11 separate directions, we’ll see what happens. There’s a unified play, there’s a strategy, there’s a plan. And so a coach pushes you to be your best, a coach gives you the plan. And the third thing a coach does, and this is probably an uncomfortable word for a lot of people, I know certainly it is for me, it’s accountability. And as a Christian, one of the biggest problems that I have with myself is hypocrisy.

(Speaker 1)
It’s where, you know, we read the Bible, we want to be a Christian, I call myself a Christian, the Bible says to do these things, and sometimes in my morning reflections, just this morning I was thinking, the Bible tells me I’m supposed to love my wife the way that Christ loved the church. I don’t know that I did that yesterday. I probably was a C -level husband yesterday. I got to at least get to a B today. And so having a coach is a great way to have kind of a mirror or that accountability, that objective feedback, that accountability to make sure that your dreams turn into actions and those actions turn into results. Because if not, you just have hope.

(Speaker 1)
And hope is sort of an opium that I think a lot of people in the American population have, where we just hope things are going to get better. We write songs about hoping things will get better.

(Speaker 2)
We watch movies about hoping.

(Speaker 1)
But looking for entropy or serendipity or some sort of luck for success to happen is not a valid strategy. Hope is not a valid strategy. You need somebody who can coach you down a proven plan, and that’s what I do. Tell me about the BS in business school. I primarily think that business school is primarily BS. I primarily find that business school involves talking about theories, thinking about concepts, theories, and things that don’t impact actually growing a company.

(Speaker 1)
But when you get out of business college or you start a business, you’ve got to learn the four steps to grow a company. Step one, find a problem. Step two, solve the problem. Step three, sell the solution. Step four, nail it and scale it. Because if you can’t sell, your business is going to go to hell and your life will not go well.

(Speaker 1)
And so most people have a degree from business school, but they have no knowledge of how to actually start and grow a successful company. I call my Thrive Time Show, I call it the Thrive Time Show Business School Without the BS, because I find that so many people, my father is one of these, where again, may he rest in peace, he went to school, he was top of his class, he graduated with great grades, but he had no concept of how to turn his goals to own a business into reality. One of the gentlemen, he came to our conference, he had terminal cancer. By the way, in the grace of God, he did not die. His name is Bob Healy, and all your listeners can go verify his story. It’s grillblazer .

(Speaker 1)
com, grillblazer . com. He showed up at one of my conferences with a quasi -functional prototype, meaning it’s a prototype that wasn’t polished, for a thing called the grill gun, which is like a flamethrower for grilling. And he had never sold any. He had never had a team.

(Speaker 1)
He never employed people. He didn’t have a website, didn’t have a logo, didn’t have a brand, didn’t have a marketing plan, but he had a prototype. And Bob came to me and said, help me. And grillblazer . com is now a massively successful company that’s becoming a household name in many American homes.

(Speaker 2)
He’s kind of like the grill master now. And that’s a guy named Bob who is battling health issues, marketing issues, branding issues, accounting issues.

(Speaker 1)
And Bob couldn’t find financing either. We actually helped Bob raise all the money to sell the product. This is the other thing I was going to ask you about. How do you view venture capital or people coming in from the outside to support you? In Bob’s case, we helped Bob do a crowdfunding campaign to help him raise money. In my case, I did the controversial strategy of working at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV, all while growing DJConnection .

(Speaker 1)
com. Whenever you get capital, there’s three C’s that come with capital, three C’s. So whoever invests in your business, there’s three C’s that come with it. Yeah, you get the money, but three C’s come with it. One is counsel. The people who invest in you are going to want to steer the direction you go.

(Speaker 1)
It’s going to happen. Three, or number two, connections. Take capital from, let’s say, Sequoia Capital or whatever the capital company is, the big venture capital fund. They’re going to have a certain political worldview, a way they view the world. I mean, Silicon Valley views the world a certain way. Middle America views the world a certain way.

(Speaker 1)
Some people are right of center. Some people are left of center. But the moment you start to take in capital into your business, you start to lose some sovereignty. So you get one, you’re going to get the council. The two, you’re going to get the connections. And then the third is you’re going to get the money, which seems obviously the capital.

(Speaker 1)
But I think a lot of times people think about capital in terms of, oh, I’ll just get the money and then I can go along and grow my company. No, no, you get the money. but you now have the connection to people that you might or might not align with, and you now are going to get their counsel or their coaching, and it might not be what you want. So I would encourage everybody out there, if possible, try to find a way to self -fund or fund from people you know. And the best book ever written on how to raise venture capital is called Pitching Hacks. Pitching Hacks.

(Speaker 2)
It’s written by Naval Ravikant.

(Speaker 1)
And it is super small and super powerful pitching hacks. You can download it for free. There are PDF versions available online. And that will help you figure out how to get money in a more independent way? He teaches the specific linear process to go through to raise money. But I would just tell you, before you try to raise money from people you don’t know, let’s say you needed to raise $50 ,000.

(Speaker 1)
It’s better to go to 10 people you know and get $5 ,000 from 10 people. who could afford to lose it, than it is to bring in an outside investor who you don’t know that well, who may or may not want to dramatically change the way in which you do business. And I’ll just give you a brief example. There was a franchise I worked with years ago, and the owner of the business was very conservative.

(Speaker 13)
And he took in outside capital, and the outside venture capitalist wanted him to take his business in a very DEI way, the diversity, the equity, the inclusion, the very woke agenda, and He really, really had a hard time because the investor wanted to dramatically alter the course of the business. I’m not an advocate for the woke investor, but the woke investor is saying, hey, I gave you all this money and without me, your business wouldn’t exist, so we’re going to go this way. I had to help that business owner decouple the business from the financing, and it was kind of a painful experience. So when possible, don’t secure outside financing from people that you don’t align with or people that you’re not equally yoked with.

(Speaker 1)
Bringing back manufacturing is essential. important feature of America being successful. Some of that is going to be small business. How many of your businesses are manufacturing, and how can that be done in your mind? I believe that my client portfolio is very indicative of the American entrepreneurial portfolio as a country. About 10 percent, I would say, ish of our portfolio has to do with manufacturing.

(Speaker 1)
So I think one of my clients is called Master Machine, mmm -usa . com. They make parts for Tesla. They make parts for the U . S. Army.

(Speaker 1)
That’s a company right here in Oklahoma that does manufacturing. I think of another brand I work with, Grid Down, Chow Down. They sell mRNA -free meat. I think about, as I mentioned, the case study of Shaw Homes, the home builder we work with, or Sky House home builders. They’re building real things right here in America. And I just, I would tell people as a pro -tip, You never want to outsource your core competency.

(Speaker 1)
Exporting jobs to China started under Nixon, but that’s just complete jackassery to outsource 95 % of our essential medical supplies to countries that hate us. We have these essential metals, these essential elements needed to make car batteries to make cars. And we have outsourced that to the point where the majority of the countries that hate us are the ones who are procuring these essential elements needed to make manufacturing possible. So America needs to do, I know you recently interviewed Eric Trump, and Eric talked about this. We’ve got to bring manufacturing back to America. We’ve got to do it.

(Speaker 1)
And so anybody out there that has that dream to make jeans in America, make a tie in America, make shirts in America, make shoes in America, make clothing in America. I encourage everybody really seize this opportunity under the Trump administration and find a way to bring manufacturing back to America. United States. We saw it happen a little bit under President Trump and Dr. Ben Carson. We saw an urban renewal. Dr. Carson was instrumental in bringing investments into urban development areas that basically the world had given up on.

(Speaker 13)
And they brought in great restaurants and nightlife and entertainment, and they rejuvenated. They put life and investment capital into these abandoned buildings and revitalized a lot of downtowns. I know we can do the same thing with manufacturing. So if you’re watching today’s show and you have the ability to reinvigorate manufacturing in America, I would encourage you to do so. I don’t speak for the Trump administration, but I know they are really wanting to team up with and support and to breathe life into entrepreneurs that want to bring manufacturing back into these United States. There’s this idea that a country can’t be successful without this core element of manufacturing.

(Speaker 1)
There’s this philosophy, right? Do you subscribe to this? The bulk of manufacturing has to be within a country for it to even be successful, ultimately. It can’t be service -oriented. It can’t be. I’m working with a client in Wisconsin who has a home remodeling company.

(Speaker 1)
He actually does beautiful home remodeling. He does great work. Well, he’s not outsourcing the manufacturing and the remodeling of a house to somebody who can do the work because he can’t. He does the work himself. Therefore, when he talks to, in this fictitious example, he talks to the Thompsons, and the Thompsons say, you know what? I want the pool table to go here.

(Speaker 1)
I want the lighting to go here. I want to move this to create this ambiance. This client, who I actually work with in Wisconsin, he’s able to get in there and get in the conversation with the client and rearrange the building plan to accommodate the client’s needs. He can do that. But if he was outsourcing that to a third world country or a second world country or some country not here, it would be very hard for him those real time modifications.

(Speaker 1)
So my client, yes, he’s a home remodeler, but I would argue he’s almost a plumber. He’s almost an electrician. He’s almost a designer. He’s almost a sales guru. He’s almost a manager. He’s almost an accountant.

(Speaker 1)
He’s wearing a lot of hats. And this is what you call a polymath, okay? And a lot of the founding fathers were polymaths. I challenge anybody out there to look up the life of Benjamin Franklin and tell me what career he was in. Thomas Jefferson, what career? Look up George Washington, what career?

(Speaker 1)
What career were these people? Were they politicians? Were they military leaders? Were they entrepreneurs? I would say a lot of our founding fathers were all of these skill sets. And I think it’s a good idea.

(Speaker 1)
to be resourceful. Now what happens is when we outsource our core competency to countries that hate us, by the way, what does that even do? I mean, I don’t, I don’t even understand how that’s a sustainable idea to make some of the cutting edge military technology that America’s military now uses.

(Speaker 68)
We have to import certain technology from countries that hate us to make military weapons to defend us.

(Speaker 1)
That doesn’t even make sense. Think about that if you go, let’s go back in the time of kings and queens and castles and imagine that you are a king trying to protect your castle. and you have to get behind your castle walls and yell out on your castle megaphone, excuse me, enemy, could you please ship us spears? We are trying to protect ourselves. From you. From you.

(Speaker 1)
And then the hostile enemy says, sure, how many spears do you need? I mean, just the jackassery, the duality, the mental gymnastics I have to go through to understand how outsourcing our core components, our core resources, our core manufacturing to countries that hate us, I just can’t do it. Also, the CCP, they are not a competition. They are an enemy. The Chinese Communist Party does forced organ harvesting.

(Speaker 2)
The Chinese Communist Party has no problem with sending people to reeducation camps.

(Speaker 1)
The Chinese Communist Party is not somebody that we should be working with. We do not want to be investing heavily into a country that has an ideological hatred towards your worldview and who has psychopathic tendencies. It’s just not a good idea. So you’re a big fan of repatriating the supply chains to America, basically. It’s just wisdom.

(Speaker 1)
America, we have the resources right now to desalinate. Unbelievable amounts of water. If there was a water shortage, if you believe that there’s a water shortage in California, we can desalinate. Think about Israel. How does Israel maintain a self -sufficient country? It’s the size of New Jersey.

(Speaker 1)
It’s surrounded by countries that hate it. I mean, if Israel can stand up for freedom and be able to be self -sustaining, think about Israel.

(Speaker 67)
They’ve turned, what, desolate land into rich, plentiful farmland.

(Speaker 1)
I mean, America, we have the tools, the technology, the drive, the critical thinking. We have the population needed to become self -sufficient, and we should be. America should be a net exporter of oil.

(Speaker 5)
America should be a net exporter of oxygen.

(Speaker 28)
automobiles.

(Speaker 5)
America should be a net exporter of technology. We should not be importing. And this idea of becoming an importing nation that provides services primarily, what that does is that sets the foundation for becoming a slave state of a Chinese communist totalitarian regime. There’s this term that’s often used, whole of society. right? And that can mean different things.

(Speaker 2)
Whole of society could mean, like in Communist China, where the Communist Party, the supremacy of the party is complete, and the party dictates what happens on down, and the whole of society has to follow because that’s how it works.

(Speaker 1)
But whole of society could also mean something else. It could also mean bottom -up, right? Which means people basically working together, getting inspired to start their small business, be on a come up with new ideas, come up with new manufacturing concepts, theories, and actually just get down and do the hard work of raising the rising tide lifts all boats. As we finish up, let’s talk a little bit about that. Well, years ago, there was a gentleman who personifies the American dream.

(Speaker 44)
His name’s Kevin Thomas.

(Speaker 1)
Everyone can look him up. His company is called MultiClean. Everyone can look him up. I think it’s multicleanok . com. Kevin made a profound statement.

(Speaker 1)
He said that if he could have just five employees, that would be success. You say, well, what does Kevin do? It’s a janitorial service. You’d say, well, what does a janitorial service do? He cleans commercial buildings. And Kevin made that profound statement.

(Speaker 1)
If I could just have five employees, that would be success. Kevin came and spoke at my last conference, because we filled a conference full of success stories. I have at least 15 to 20 success stories at every client, real people. And Kevin, if you look at Kevin, he’s not the tallest guy in the room. He doesn’t come across like he’s some entrepreneurial pedigree. He doesn’t look like he’s been, you know, he doesn’t look like he’s the Hollywood entrepreneur.

(Speaker 1)
He doesn’t look like he’s on some reality TV show. He doesn’t look like he’s a celebrity. He just looks like a very normal person, just like me, just like you. And at the last conference, somebody put their hand up and they said, well, Kevin, you’re having a lot of success. How many employees do you have now? He says, just a hair over 350.

(Speaker 1)
Think about that for a second. So this guy, Kevin Thomas, had a goal to have just five employees. He thought entrepreneurship wasn’t, quite for him, that maybe he didn’t have the education, he didn’t have the marketing background, he didn’t have the accounting, he didn’t have the skills, but what he did is he went on over to Thrivetimeshow . com, that’s where I live, Thrivetimeshow . com, and he went there said, you know what, I’m gonna fill out the form, and I’m gonna schedule a call with this crazy guy, and we’ll just see what happens. He has

(Speaker 1)
He has 350 employees. He’s one of the most successful people in his town. And I share that story because everybody out there, you can become successful. And when you are, money’s a magnifier, good and bad, by the way. So money allows you to be more of who you are. So if you’re a generous person, person who loves to donate and celebrate and tithe to your local church or community or your outreach, you can give more.

(Speaker 1)
Money allows you to be more, to give more, to be. It allows you to just magnify who you are. And so if you’re watching this show, And you’re kind of in the mind space where my 37 -year -old father was, where he was delivering pizzas at Domino’s Pizza, which, again, great company. We’re appreciative for that opportunity. He was working at Quick Trip Gas Stations, and we appreciate that opportunity, too. He’s working the night shift.

(Speaker 1)
And I have not an ounce of resentment that my father was working the night shift during my years growing up.

(Speaker 2)
I respect him for doing it.

(Speaker 13)
But if you feel like, man, success has passed me by, Kevin was the guy in his early 40s who was having these thoughts, and now he’s profoundly successful. Clay Stairs, who’s now an Oklahoma state representative, he started his entrepreneurial path when he was 47 years old, and now he’s super successful. Bob Healy had terminal cancer and was in his early 60s, and now Grillblazer is booming.

(Speaker 51)
I can list off examples all day, but everybody out there, if you have the mental capacity and tenacity to listen to today’s interview, I promise you, you, you have what it takes to do it as an entrepreneur.

(Speaker 12)
Well, Clay Clark, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Clay Clark and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. this nozzle on the top you slightly turn like almost nothing so a little bit of the gas starts coming out and then you press the trigger you can either turn the nozzle on the top to have more power and this one here is a full power trigger basically madness push it down and yeah it is a lot of fun called Grilling Industry and the name of my business is Grillblazer. How will I apply what I’ve learned so far?

(Speaker 12)
into my business. I’m actually a client of the Y15 and I learn so much from what I’m learning at this conference and my regular weekly attendances that it’s helping me establish the business and get it off the ground. Everything that you see is authentically clay. It’s a great deal of fun.

(Speaker 66)
Everybody enjoys it.

(Speaker 12)
They know when they walk in they think they’re coming into a carnival and frankly they are. It’s just great fun.

(Speaker 1)
It’s not another conference like it. You just don’t go to a carnival atmosphere and learn like we do here at the Thrive Conference. It’s great. The reason people should attend at least one of these conferences is because it’s common sense. And everybody’s fed an entire line about the way you should run a business, but until you actually experience running a business, which is, candidly, what you learn here, how to run a business, you don’t know what you’re doing. On today’s show,

(Speaker 1)
we find ourselves at the intersection and entrepreneurship as we interview the founder of the grill gun products and what Mister Bob Healy this engineer of over 30 years has invented a product that combines the look of a gun that shoots fire so that you can light your charcoal grill within just 60 seconds.

(Speaker 47)
But before we talk about Bob and his beautiful Let’s talk about the products that I’ve almost invented.

(Speaker 1)
Let’s talk about the products that you’ve almost invented. Let’s talk about the ideas we’ve all had that we have not acted upon. Jason, I couldn’t sleep all last night. I had this awesome idea. Check it out. This idea is going to change the world.

(Speaker 61)
Are you familiar with babies?

(Speaker 29)
I used to be one.

(Speaker 1)
Okay, so babies spend all their time doing what?

(Speaker 65)
uh crying eating pooping crawling ah sure they crawl right yes so what if we converted their onesie you know they wear like one thing oh yeah onesie where it’s like the top and the bottom that’s like a baby sock what if we turned that into a mop So it could be called the baby mop.

(Speaker 1)
So your baby’s mopping the floor. And they just clean as it goes. Oh. Yes. That’s probably the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life. What?

(Speaker 1)
I thought deeply about that for several minutes. That idea was going to be my path to financial freedom and riches.

(Speaker 40)
Okay, fine.

(Speaker 1)
You want to rain on my parade? I have another idea. I thought about this last Tuesday. It’s incredible.

(Speaker 37)
Men like to do what?

(Speaker 52)
They get kind of older.

(Speaker 16)
They have some success.

(Speaker 1)
They’re looking to relax. They want to get a prostate exam. 18 holes.

(Speaker 63)
Well, that’s out.

(Speaker 28)
They want to go golf.

(Speaker 1)
Right. And guys often have to go to the bathroom, right? And when guys go to the bathroom, typically they do what? When they’re going to the bathroom, they’re looking for a magazine.

(Speaker 43)
Right.

(Speaker 61)
They read.

(Speaker 1)
They read now.

(Speaker 53)
But what if they invested the time they normally spent reading and spent that time perfecting their putting game?

(Speaker 1)
Jason, it’s so easy. We could just take the floor around the toilet and turn that into a putting green.

(Speaker 64)
No one’s thought of this.

(Speaker 15)
Yeah, because it’s a bad idea.

(Speaker 1)
You could practice putting while pooping.

(Speaker 5)
That is the worst. It’s the poop putt. The poop putt. That’s it.

(Speaker 16)
The poop putt. Well, hey, you know, this idea is special because it is, in fact, the worst idea that anybody has ever had. What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought.

(Speaker 1)
Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.

(Speaker 8)
Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show.

(Speaker 1)
But this show does. two men, eight kids co -created by two different women, 13 multi -million dollar businesses.

(Speaker 53)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Thrive Time Show.

(Speaker 1)
Yes and yes, Thrive Nation, welcome back to another exciting edition of The Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. And Dr. Z, today’s show guest deserves some cowbell. Oh, and he got four yeses too.

(Speaker 24)
I know when you fire off a show with four yeses, You are fired up and ready to go.

(Speaker 43)
Now, Zee, I wanted to allow this listener to be introduced with a kind of a subtle hype intro.

(Speaker 48)
Yes.

(Speaker 1)
So I brought my megaphone with me. And so we’ll go ahead and tee it up here.

(Speaker 22)
Let me get this ready here.

(Speaker 63)
Here we go. Here we go.

(Speaker 4)
Here we go. All right, Tribe Nation. On today’s show, we have the inventor of the grill gun, Mr. Bob Healy, an engineer with over 30 years of experience.

(Speaker 1)
He’s the founder of this great new product. Bob, welcome on to the show. How are you? Oh, I’m just fine, Clay. Thank you. Thank you both, Dr. Z and Clay, for having me on today.

(Speaker 1)
Well, tell the listeners out there who are not familiar with the grill gun. I think anybody out there, if you’ve ever wanted to be an inventor, it’s a tough road to go down, Z. It’s a tough road. And all the listeners right now, if you will go to grillblazer .

(Speaker 50)
com, that’s grillblazer .

(Speaker 4)
com, you can see this product. So you can check it out while he’s talking. You can look at it and marinate on it and see it. Talk to us about this this grill gun. And when did you first get the idea to make the grill gun. Oh well.

(Speaker 4)
So the grill gun is a high powered torch. It’s it’s designed to be able to conveniently light charcoal charcoal grill in just minutes rather than tens of minutes or half an hour at a time or something like that. It’s really not even a tool or a type of tool that people have been or could be familiar with, because it’s entirely new, both in its purpose and in its appearance. What you do with the grill gun is you use it to light a charcoal grill, and it’s designed to fit in your hand comfortably and use safely while you actually light the charcoal almost instantly, warm up your grill, sterilize the grates, start cooking over your charcoal and or your smoker, you know, your wood smoker, offset smokers in just minutes.

(Speaker 8)
The whole notion of lighting a charcoal grill pretty much instantly is not something that people have done.

(Speaker 37)
I know there are a lot of YouTube guys

(Speaker 8)
that are out there and people like me who sort of We really like the idea of starting a charcoal real fast and not having having to use a lighter fluid or wait around on a charcoal chimney or any of the other things that are done for it and Um, when you light a charcoal with a 400 ,000 BTU torch, you’re basically setting that charcoal on fire and you’re cooking off all the debris that’s on the grills. And you’re at the same time, you’re bringing the whole grill up to temperature. So you’re basically, you’re doing it in just, uh, when I go, when I go grill and I I’m cooking in two or three minutes after I start the process.

(Speaker 1)
And it’s a year round activity.

(Speaker 6)
And Bob, you feel like a man.

(Speaker 4)
Yeah.

(Speaker 32)
Like a man Rambo of the grill.

(Speaker 4)
I mean, come on now. You just feel like a man. It’s a man gun. Yeah. It’s pretty amazing watching people, their reaction to it, because it does hit that Y chromosome pretty hard. You’re feeling like a man.

(Speaker 1)
You’re out there. It’s 25 degrees. You like to grill.

(Speaker 62)
You can run back in the house where it’s warm, but it doesn’t matter.

(Speaker 1)
You can grill year round. It doesn’t have to be an outdoor summertime activity, even though that’s how a lot of people like looking at it. Now, my understanding is, OK, so we have a grill gun here. This thing can help our listeners light their charcoal grill in 60 seconds. And it’s fun, Z. It’s fun. Oh, it’s fun.

(Speaker 1)
But what does it look like, the grill gun? Does the grill gun, I mean, I’ve seen some pretty, you know, I don’t know the technical term for it, but I’ve seen some pretty weak.

(Speaker 4)
Versions of what Bob is creating up to people who’ve tried to create a grill torch. Yeah, but it’s kind of like It has the class some of these products have the class and quality of like the Chinese finger locks the paper locks Oh, don’t kid yourself. I mean very so talk to me about this. What does it look like? What does it feel like?

(Speaker 1)
Does this feel like a man gun or does it feel like a man? I think I think one person who interviewed actually reviewed it said he felt like he had seen Prometheus for the first time.

(Speaker 35)
And it just it was so intense feeling of looking at a torch that looks like a pistol, like a 45 or a Glock or something like that, a semi -automatic, semi -automatic slide action pistol that has a long bell on it.

(Speaker 1)
It’s over, it’s about 22 inches long in order to get the barrel away from you so that you can use it without burning yourself.

(Speaker 35)
But it looks like a gun, it feels like a gun, it shoots fire, you hold on to it, it fits nicely in your hand, it’s well balanced.

(Speaker 1)
And you use it to really just basically flood the grill with the heat that you need in order to bring it up to the temperature you want to cook in just under a minute. Now, Z, I want to get into the business -y kind of things. This is a business show. It technically is a business show. So it’s business school without the BS. Come on now.

(Speaker 1)
So Bob, you made the product. Z, that’s step one. You got to have your product.

(Speaker 8)
That helps. So step one, you have the product. It’s a product idea, step one.

(Speaker 1)
Step two, nobody, Z, I’m talking about almost nobody ever goes to step two.

(Speaker 33)
And that is make a prototype.

(Speaker 1)
Oh, check. He’s got the P. He has the prototype.

(Speaker 61)
You got the idea?

(Speaker 60)
Yep.

(Speaker 1)
He’s got the prototype? Yes. Step three, we got to try to sell something. You got to sell it, baby.

(Speaker 35)
Sell something.

(Speaker 1)
Sell something. For more than you make it. Sell something. That’s the key.

(Speaker 4)
So I want to ask you this. Talk to us about, if someone wants to buy this thing, can they buy it? What’s been your road like of seeing if someone wants to buy it? Because I know you did a demo at the Thrive Time Show conference for our attendees. Oh, yeah. And I think about one third of the people in attendance, I could be wrong, but I think about a third of the people in attendance said, I definitely want to buy one of these like right now.

(Speaker 4)
How can the listeners get a hold of this? How can they buy one? Tell us about selling something. OK, so the process of putting this out on the market is when you’re trying to bootstrap something up from the bottom without having venture capital or something like that step in and say, here, you need this money. Let’s go for it. You actually have to determine whether or not people want what you have, what they’re willing to pay for what you’ve got.

(Speaker 4)
And then how are you going to get it made? And so I had to figure out, first off, there’s torches. You can get a torch today if you go down the hardware store. You can buy one. And it’s long, and it’s got a long hose, and it goes to a 20 -pound tank. And you can look like a dork like I have done for the last 10 years, you know, standing back and flaming up my charcoal grill.

(Speaker 4)
And If you want to do that, knock yourself up, go ahead and do it. And like I said, I’ve been doing that for a long time and I decided to make something that really did the job right. And so it’s the same sort of technology in that you’re putting high intense fire on a grill, but how do you make that into something that people want? And how do you get it in front of them? So if your listeners have gone to grillblazer . com, they’re already taking a look at this.

(Speaker 4)
They can see what it looks like, but they can’t hold it in their hand. Why? And what they can do, The reason they can’t hold it in their hand is because it’s on a computer screen and they need to order one in order to get one. But in order to do that, the hardest part about launching this endeavor is where are you going to come up with the capital to make it happen? And I decided to go the crowdfunding route. And so what I’m asking people to do is to go to the website and entertain themselves, figure out if this is for them.

(Speaker 4)
And if it’s not, you know, move along. But if it is for them, then take it on good faith that what I’m doing in crowdsourcing is I’m using that tool, that whole platform. There are a couple of them out there. I’m looking right now pretty hard at Kickstarter. But you use that platform to allow people to come out and say, I want one.

(Speaker 4)
I’ll back you. And when you make them, you send them to me. And so the process is pretty straightforward. You basically are pre -selling them. You say, I’m going to make them. If I hit the minimum threshold that I need to have in order to be able to have the finances to make it work, then I can build them.

(Speaker 4)
And that’s really my business. I’ve done this all my life. I’ve made things. The easy part is for me, it’s my wheelhouse. to create a product and figure out how to build it and how to make it a high quality product. But the new part, my new venture really is, is being out on the sales edge and on the financing edge.

(Speaker 4)
How are you going to fund it? How are you going to turn it into a business that everybody wants to get behind? So in order for them to get their hands on one right now, they really can’t.

(Speaker 1)
I’ve got a dozen of them that I’ve made that are prototypes. I’ve sent them out. People have used them. They kind of rotate around in a pool of grow guns that can be used for the purpose of promotion.

(Speaker 32)
But it’s a four to six month process to actually get them in your hands.

(Speaker 4)
And so if I were to, like, for instance, today, with this podcast, with your audience, if enough people actually went out there and said, I want to do this, I want one of those things.

(Speaker 1)
And they simply said, you know, in my little buy it, see, get yours now page on the on the website.

(Speaker 4)
If they were to say, I want to support this, I want to do this, then before Christmas, even before Thanksgiving, they could be in production and in your hands. And that’s the beauty of crowdfunding. And the direction that I’m taking it here is that I can launch it, I can have it in people’s hands, and we can be going down the road. Bob, for the listeners out there who maybe are pondering or going, is this guy delusional? Is this guy crazy? You are a man with an engineering background.

(Speaker 4)
How many years have you been an engineer? Let’s see. I’m going to give away my age here, but it’s been almost 40 years.

(Speaker 8)
So how many of these people do you need out there right now to say, I want to buy one before we can get this thing in the hands of America? Well, the way crowdfunding works is you actually set your deadline, your minimum that you absolutely have to have. And I absolutely have to have 1 ,400 people, that’s 1 -4 -0 -0, say, I want to have one.

(Speaker 36)
And I’m a tenth of the way there after having just a few weeks of just doing advertising on Google and Facebook.

(Speaker 8)
And so the whole Kickstarter community is bigger than that.

(Speaker 1)
And so it seems like a real doable number. And if people were to actually just believe that it will happen, if they like it well enough, and they say, yeah, I’ll support you, then what will happen is, is when I see that I actually have people up over that number, then I’m going to just email everybody.

(Speaker 51)
And, uh, so you’d want to put in your email and your text number, and then I’ll just do a broadcast.

(Speaker 59)
Everybody say the Kickstarter websites up, it’s live, go find it.

(Speaker 1)
And, uh, as soon as I see that that actually happened and it’s funded, then I can actually start the manufacturing process going. Bob, what made you come up with the grill gun?

(Speaker 58)
What were you thinking?

(Speaker 8)
Did you fall and hit your head? On the toilet seat. Yeah, did you, you know, did you have a bad accident as a kid from a burn?

(Speaker 35)
I mean, there’s something.

(Speaker 4)
This ice cream, this yogurt is curdled. That’s gross.

(Speaker 1)
I feel sick.

(Speaker 57)
Oh, look what I just drew with my vomit.

(Speaker 4)
It’s the grill blazer. How does that happen? Do you have a dream? And this mythical grill gun came to you? in the dream and said, make me, make me. What happened?

(Speaker 4)
All of the above. It was… I was outside talking to a horse. This is what he decided to do. Like I’ve been saying, I’ve been doing this for a long time and putting up with buying torches that they… You know, a weed torch, a torch that puts out that kind of heat, 400 ,000 BTU is..

(Speaker 4)
. It’s going to burn up fairly quickly. And so I’ve gone through several of them over the last decade. And I thought, you know, nobody does this. And people come over and they watch me grill. I grill every single week or smoke something.

(Speaker 4)
And so lots of friends and stuff are used to coming over and they hear the roar of the jet engine as I light the grill and start cooking things in just a minute or two. And they think it’s really funny and really cool, but they don’t see themselves with this giant long torch hosing down a grill. And I, so it was a year ago in December, uh, December, 2018, that I was out there grilling. And I thought, you know, if I’m either going to put up with this nonsense for the rest of my life, or I’m going to do something about it. So I just said, I got to, I didn’t know what a grill gun was. I hadn’t ever seen one before.

(Speaker 4)
I thought, well. Something is better than this, and what is it going to be? And so I went to some friends and my family. I’ve got sons -in -law and sons that are opinionated, and I like the opinions. And so I basically started asking them questions and formed a list of what we need to have. And then I got busy modeling it.

(Speaker 4)
And it was about, so that was December. And it’s probably in February, everybody said, oh, You’re on with something here.

(Speaker 8)
And then by May, I had it. I mean, a year ago, May, so not quite. a year ago, I actually had prototypes in my hand.

(Speaker 4)
And I then started going down the other channels of, okay, how do I build this? How do I get this cost effective so that I can make it and people can buy it for a reasonable price? And utmost important was the quality of it.

(Speaker 1)
So, I’ve designed this to where I’m going to be proud to use every single grill gun that I have for years, not for once or twice or for half a season before it burns up. So it was just a process of saying, I don’t know what it is that’s going to make my life better, but I know when I see it, I’m going to like it.

(Speaker 39)
You know, again, if you’re on the website or your listeners have listened to and gone to the website, they know what I’m talking about here.

(Speaker 1)
It’s pretty appealing design, and it’s really durable, really well designed. So Bob, you’re basically a big pyro. I mean, that’s really what it boils down to. I mean, you’re a big pyro.

(Speaker 4)
Well, I’m not as much a pyro as the people that want it. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of people say this is all kinds of stories about how I’ve been I’ve been a pyro my whole life and that sort of thing. And I, not me, but I, I can appreciate that there are people that like fire a whole lot.

(Speaker 56)
Now let’s talk about this, this, this, this grill gun.

(Speaker 4)
Let’s get into the rough questions now, the rough ones, the tough ones. All right.

(Speaker 32)
Uh, will this blow up?

(Speaker 1)
You know, if I turn it on, I mean, what are the chances? I turned it on.

(Speaker 4)
What are the chances I incinerate myself? Well, pretty, pretty small. I mean, there’s, you’d have to be deliberate wanting to do that. Because what you’re working with is protein gas, and you know, propane gas. is explosive. So you could do things that I warn you not to do.

(Speaker 4)
Like you could turn on the grill gun inside the house and just let it run like that for a while and then say, okay, I think I’ve got enough propane in the air and then light it. I wouldn’t advise that. That’s not a best practice move. That’s not, that’s not a top three thing to do. No. And, um, so, The real problem in trying to design and sell something like this where you’re handling that much heat, I’m dealing with the same sort of thing that every torch manufacturer out there has.

(Speaker 4)
You’ve got to build something that’s safe, and then you have to warn people about how to use it.

(Speaker 1)
Because the nuts and bolts of it is you have a propane source, a small one -pound can, or you can tie it into a 20 -pound bottle, and you’ve got to screw that onto the bottom of the grill gun, and now you’ve pressurized the grill gun. And that affords the opportunity for the gas to come out the bell.

(Speaker 6)
And so when the gas comes out the bell, you want to light it when it comes out so that you’re not just expelling propane in the air, which is explosive.

(Speaker 1)
Because if you burn it while it’s coming out the bell, you don’t have any danger. And there’s nothing about the gun itself or the design of the self where it’s going to pocket enough propane to explode on its own. It couldn’t do that. But what it could do is you could vent it into an environment that, you know, where the gas is itself explosive. But this is not new. The grills gun itself is some really innovative new technology.

(Speaker 1)
But the notion of taking gas out of a gas container, poping gas out of a bottle and lighting it on fire is, you know, tried and true for decades. So I’m not doing anything there that’s in any way dangerous that would create a problem for anybody to operate one. What have been and…

(Speaker 4)
want to ask Bob, see I’m now going to ask Bob the really tough questions. Are you going deep, deep, deep? What has been, as you’re building the grill gun, which you can learn more about at the grillblazer . com, it’s grillblazer . com, see that’s grillblazer . com.

(Speaker 4)
And for all the listeners out there who are going onto the website right now, they’re looking at it, what’s been the toughest part of trying to take your idea, that you are, and I mean this in a nice way, you are passionate in a way about this product that doesn’t make sense to most people. Most people, see, most people like to grill. Oh yeah. And most people want to light the grill in 60 seconds. But most people aren’t willing to invest this kind of money and time into coming up with a solution. Bob, as you’ve been trying to provide the world’s best grilling tool possible, what has been the most challenging part of doing this?

(Speaker 1)
Um, really everything except for designing it and setting up the manufacturing.

(Speaker 8)
I mean, it’s hard to actually pin that down to one thing, but getting on, uh, on, uh, getting in front of people who can help influence or charcoal influencers and getting them to pay attention and, um, helping me promote this notion. It’s basically, you can have, you can have the best tool of anything, whatever you want.

(Speaker 46)
And if nobody knows about it.

(Speaker 1)
you know, you’re just sitting there holding them. I could make 5 ,000 grill guns and put them out in my garage. And then next year I still have 5 ,000 grill guns out. So it really is trying to get an audience that, um, that wants to buy them. And so it wouldn’t make any sense for me to just get excited, you know, 1400 people excited to buy one and then launch my Kickstarter campaign and then crickets, you know, nobody, uh, nobody wants any. So it’s, it’s the whole aspect of,

(Speaker 1)
marketing and sales. That’s the hard part because everything else is it’s pretty straightforward. You’ve told me for years I’m one of the best tools that the world has not heard of yet. I promise you, Bob, if you put 5 ,000 of those in your garage, you’re going to end up with 4 ,999. Because I’m going to come over and snipe one of them.

(Speaker 35)
So there you have it.

(Speaker 4)
Z, what tough questions do you have for Bob about the process? Because there’s so many listeners out there who want to be an inventor.

(Speaker 1)
They want to launch a product.

(Speaker 55)
He’s done step one.

(Speaker 4)
He had the idea. Step two, though, he made the prototype.

(Speaker 8)
Step three, he’s got to try to sell it. As he’s in that pre -selling phase, and it’s a weird deal, because you’ve got to sell enough to get the money needed to produce a lot.

(Speaker 33)
Z, what rude question do you have for Bob?

(Speaker 8)
What strong advice did you have for Bob? What do you got there? How much money do you need right now? I need $100 ,000. And if you want to write me a check, Z, I will drive you into town. What are you willing to give up for $100 ,000?

(Speaker 8)
I mean, like a kidney? Well, obviously, I’m willing to give up whatever it would take in the form of a loan, and I would also be willing to give up, you know, negotiate on a piece of the equity in the company for whatever the investor thinks that it’s worth.

(Speaker 1)
Well, there’s there’s that that’s always a negotiation. Yeah, there’s there’s, you know.

(Speaker 38)
hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of people are going to be listening to this podcast, i .

(Speaker 8)
e.

(Speaker 16)
radio show.

(Speaker 1)
And somewhere, someone’s going to get on there and look at grillblazer .

(Speaker 8)
com, which I have been looking at now for the entirety of the podcast and looking at it and remembering my experience with the grillblazer. It’s a cool product. It’s cool. And I’m sitting out there thinking there’s probably somebody out there that does this. You know, they’ve got their they got their money in, you know, in a savings account drawing nothing. Maybe they got a few thousands in the stock market.

(Speaker 8)
They’re willing to put a hundred thousand dollars

(Speaker 1)
different businesses and hopefully one hits.

(Speaker 4)
And hopefully one hits.

(Speaker 54)
And they go to their website and they go, hmm, OK.

(Speaker 4)
How much? What do I get for $100 ,000? So how does somebody contact you? What’s the best way to contact you? Somebody’s listening out there going, you know what? I may want to…

(Speaker 1)
It depends on the equity piece you give up. It depends on a lot of things, but still, that’s negotiable. We don’t want to go into that right now in the air. But how does somebody contact you and start that process? Well, the most direct way that it’ll get to me is Bob at GrillBlazer . com.

(Speaker 4)
And if you… If you don’t know anything about the internet and you don’t have email and you do have a rotary dial phone, then you could dial 918 -960 -9690. What’s that number again?

(Speaker 8)
918 -960 -9690. I think I might have said that wrong the first time. 918 -960 -9690. It’s on your website. Now, Bob, as we wrap up today’s show, what final question do you have for Dr. Zellner? Dr. Zellner is a, Z, you’re a guy that people short tank you all the time.

(Speaker 8)
They’re always wanting to pick your brain for business tips.

(Speaker 53)
Z, is it OK if he asks you any questions?

(Speaker 1)
Absolutely. OK, Bob, what question do you have for Dr. Z as we wrap up today’s show? So do you, Dr. Z, know, have an impression, just having seen the grill gun?

(Speaker 51)
And you’ve seen people’s reaction to it.

(Speaker 1)
Do you think that this is something that is, you know, that is a thing that is going to go? Okay, first of all, I do have an impression.

(Speaker 15)
I do.

(Speaker 8)
I do Forrest Gump fairly well.

(Speaker 1)
That’s my boat, Jenae. I was just running. We were like,

(Speaker 23)
peas and carrots So I do have I got a couple of impressions that I do number one on sidebar I you know, you probably don’t want to hear all of them today, but that was a good one though. Thank you Can I do this? As you’re formulating your answer, I’m just going to cue up a little motivational quote that you want.

(Speaker 15)
This is a voicemail.

(Speaker 8)
I think it came from you to me. Oh, I did. This has been during that phase of our career in life where you called me happy. That was my nickname was happy.

(Speaker 50)
I’m just going to cue it up.

(Speaker 52)
OK, good.

(Speaker 8)
And I’ll cue it up as you formulate your answer.

(Speaker 44)
That way, what your feedback you give Bob will not either be Super euphorically awesome or soul -crushing.

(Speaker 8)
We don’t want that Simon Cowell moment to happen without a lot of premeditative thoughts. So here we go Rise above it Energy walk out the bad harness energy block bad feel the flow happy feel it.

(Speaker 51)
It’s circular It’s like a carousel you pay the quarter you get on the horse.

(Speaker 1)
It goes up and down and around Circular circle with the music the flow all good things All good things.

(Speaker 35)
All right.

(Speaker 8)
Good things, Bobby. To answer your serious question, that is, yes, I think it’s pretty cool. And I do think there’s a market for it. I don’t know how many times people look at me and say, there’s nothing to buy you. What do you buy the man who has everything? A grill gun!

(Speaker 8)
Number two, I would do my best effort to approach Hasty Bake, to approach Oklahoma Joe’s, to approach some barbecue places that, you know, barbecue, i . e. is grilling, by almost definition, right, anymore. I would maybe do a co -sponsorship. Maybe it’s the… But what if they steal my idea?

(Speaker 8)
Well, then that’s just what you… You have them sign an NDA before you approach them, and then you talk to them about co -marketing, co -branding this. But what if they say no? Then you go to the next one, you knock on another door. Who do I call? Ghostbusters.

(Speaker 8)
No, I’m sorry. You start off, you make a list. you make your top 100, you make a top 10, top 12, top 50, okay, of people that might be interested in co – co -managing this with you, you know? Now you’re going to have to give up some of the juice. You already said, hey, for $100 ,000, I’m going to give up some equity position anyway. So maybe you go to somebody who themselves are in the grilling business.

(Speaker 8)
How much would you be willing to give up? You see, if you were in Bob’s shoes, let’s say, and you get a deal with Hasty Bank says, yeah, we love it. Let’s do it.

(Speaker 50)
How much equity would you be prepared to give up on a product that would be stillborn, essentially, without funding.

(Speaker 1)
How much would you, Z, advise a young man to say, hey, I’m willing to give up, you should be prepared to give up up to this much of your company for that funding?

(Speaker 31)
Well, it depends on the amount, and it depends on what I feel like I’ve already put into it personally.

(Speaker 51)
I don’t know how much money you’ve put into this already, but you have put some money in.

(Speaker 15)
You have put some time in.

(Speaker 8)
I would be able to document that, and I’d be able to get that a reasonable amount of money for that, okay? How much is the invention worth? Reasonable. How much time have you put in? Reasonable. And how much physical money have you put into it?

(Speaker 8)
These are all reasonable numbers that a businessman would want to see. And so then, if $100 ,000 is a third of that, then I would say they’re giving up a third of the equity.

(Speaker 1)
I mean, money is money. Cash talks.

(Speaker 4)
So you’re saying if Bob put in $100 ,000 of his own money, and Hasty Bakes says, hey, we’re going to put $100 ,000 in, you might be willing to give up 49 %? Correct. I mean, at the most, you want to negotiate. But I mean, at the most. At the most, you’ve got to be ready for that.

(Speaker 8)
You’ve got to be ready for it. Right. It’s kind of like, well, OK, you’ve got $100 ,000 in. If I’m putting $100 ,000 in, why are we not more equal?

(Speaker 50)
Why are you only going to give up 2 % of the company?

(Speaker 4)
Don’t be stupid like that.

(Speaker 1)
You watch Shark Tank at all. Those guys come on there with these ridiculous ads. So Bob, does that feedback help you?

(Speaker 8)
And do you have any final closing question? I’ll just drill into that question a little bit deeper.

(Speaker 42)
It really wasn’t so much how much to give up as you see, Dr. Z, you see a lot of stuff people try and shark tank you all the time.

(Speaker 16)
And I’m just curious if I were not that I’m going to do this, but I just mean, on the on the quality of the kind of product that comes across your desk.

(Speaker 1)
Is this the kind of thing that you see that has legs? Or is this the kind of thing that you say, you know, next, let’s go do something else?

(Speaker 45)
I think it has legs.

(Speaker 47)
I think it’s kind of fun.

(Speaker 8)
It’s kind of a fun, novelty, but yet useful gift.

(Speaker 1)
And really, your final price point on it is going to be roughly what?

(Speaker 6)
What are you thinking?

(Speaker 8)
Oh, well, just for easy talking purposes, $100, but that includes shipping. See, I think $150. I think a guy would pay $150. This is a completely unnecessary item. Well, that’s the fun of it.

(Speaker 14)
I think, though, you keep it $99 .99.

(Speaker 1)
Really? $99 .99?

(Speaker 46)
Yeah.

(Speaker 15)
What if it was, like, in the shape of an Uzi or an AR? I mean, for an AR -themed one? Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

(Speaker 1)
It looks pretty cool.

(Speaker 6)
It looks like James Bond would, like, you know, go and take over the country.

(Speaker 8)
But, I mean, if they had, like, an AR version, I mean, would you spend up to $150 ,000 on that thing?

(Speaker 4)
You might have different.

(Speaker 35)
You could have a rifle.

(Speaker 8)
You could have a little .22 version, a little bitty flame.

(Speaker 49)
If you’re a cigar lighter, you know, you want to light your cigar.

(Speaker 1)
You know, the grill blazer, the grill gun could be, you know, you’d have different variations. Down the road, you know, you could have the, you know, I’m serious.

(Speaker 3)
I’m going to pump up the fire.

(Speaker 1)
Or you can have a product that’s always fun. You give the gift, and it’s the Grillblazer line of landmines.

(Speaker 8)
Yeah, that’s also fun too.

(Speaker 1)
So it just randomly starts.

(Speaker 6)
You just blow it up.

(Speaker 43)
You just say, I buried that in your yard.

(Speaker 35)
And at some point, it will emit flames.

(Speaker 8)
And for $100, I’ll tell you where it is. If not, good luck.

(Speaker 7)
I don’t need you on my marketing team.

(Speaker 1)
Oh, you do.

(Speaker 43)
You do, my friend.

(Speaker 1)
That’s so good.

(Speaker 48)
Great tagline.

(Speaker 1)
It can grill charcoal in 60 seconds and squirrels in 30.

(Speaker 26)
All I got to do is have landmines in the yard.

(Speaker 47)
Take back control of your yard for $100.

(Speaker 1)
Grill a squirrel or charcoal in 60 seconds.

(Speaker 16)
Yes, I do think it has legs.

(Speaker 15)
And like I said, it’s a fun gift because it works. It’s clean.

(Speaker 8)
It looks good.

(Speaker 26)
It’s well built.

(Speaker 46)
I’ve already fired the trigger myself.

(Speaker 1)
And I think, like I said before, it kind of gets into that, you know, like those catalogs you flip through on the airplane.

(Speaker 45)
Oh, yeah, it does.

(Speaker 8)
Oh, it should be on that.

(Speaker 26)
Fingerhook catalog.

(Speaker 1)
Get myself a fingerhook catalog.

(Speaker 43)
Oh, yeah.

(Speaker 1)
Get myself a recliner with a back scratcher. Oh, yeah. And then get myself a grill blazer. And get myself a whole collection of Chinese finger locks. And then I’m set.

(Speaker 44)
That’s all I need.

(Speaker 1)
That’s all I need. For the man, for the guy who has everything, now you have your grill gun. The grill gun.

(Speaker 8)
Yeah.

(Speaker 43)
You can grill a squirrel or charcoal in under 60 seconds.

(Speaker 4)
Guaranteed.

(Speaker 1)
Endorsed by Batman. That’s right. OK, Bob, I appreciate you. And check Norris. Bob, it’s grillblazer . com.

(Speaker 1)
Our listeners out there, I know they’re going to go check it out. Grillblazer . com. Check it out. Z, you could be one of the first 1 ,400 people in America to buy this beautiful item. You’d be a real man.

(Speaker 1)
The drill gun endorsed by Chuck Norris. I think that’s the tagline. By the way, if Chuck did endorse this, wouldn’t it be over for him if he got a celebrity endorsement from Chuck Norris? That’s one of the moves. That’s a move.

(Speaker 30)
That’s a move.

(Speaker 1)
That’d be a great move.

(Speaker 15)
Bob, I appreciate you so much.

(Speaker 1)
And Z and I are going to go pontificate about the NFL upcoming draft. We’re going to be talking about all things NBA. We got a lot to cover here, Z. So thank you so much, Bob. Have a great day. Jason, have you sincerely ever had an idea to invent something? Yeah, but they’ve always been bad.

(Speaker 1)
They don’t really service a need. So this is more of something that you’ve had an idea, thought about it for maybe half a day, then you move on? Yeah. OK. Well, if you’re out there and you sincerely have an idea or an invention that you want to refine, and you want to get launched and turned into something that could make money that could become a business, I would highly recommend that you start by thinking of problems that real people have.

(Speaker 1)
and look for a better way to solve that problem or a way to solve the problem that people really have. That’s why I think that the grill gun will do well because men like to grill and they sincerely want to use charcoal because it typically tastes better. But now you can use the grill gun to light your charcoal grill in just 60 seconds. Oh, and I’ve used it, and it saved me so much time. I don’t have to taste lighter fluid. It’s awesome.

(Speaker 1)
And it’s a lot of fun. Oh, it’s so much fun. It’s like a gun -shaped torch. It combines grilling. You’ve got the fire. You’ve got the gun to hold.

(Speaker 1)
It’s a fantastic gift. I encourage you to check out the website today. Again, in case you missed it earlier, it’s called grillblazer .

(Speaker 10)
com. And if you’re interested in learning how to become the best inventor you can possibly be, I would recommend that everybody goes out and purchases a copy of the book called Secrets from an Inventor’s Notebook. Secrets from an Inventor’s Notebook by Maurice Kanbar, the creator of Sky Vodka, and a guy that is the holder of An incredible number of patents. The modern needle protector, you know, that’s Maurice Canbar’s invention. Oh, wow. The Sky Vodka, that’s his invention.

(Speaker 10)
It’s huge. You have the modern traffic lights. A lot of people don’t realize this, but the modern traffic lights, a lot of them are using Maurice Canbar’s patented invention that makes a strobe light that strobes so fast that the average person doesn’t see it strobing, but it dramatically reduces the amount of electricity being used because it’s not on the whole time. It’s strobing. Interesting. This guy’s got a ton of inventions and he wrote how he did it, how to do it, how to implement it.

(Speaker 10)
the process. It’s not a random thing he’s doing here. It’s a proven process he’s done time and time again. And you can get that book today. It’s called Secrets from an Inventor’s Notebook by Maurice Kanbar, the creator of Sky Vodka. It’s an incredible book.

(Speaker 10)
Everybody out there should own it if you’re looking to become an inventor. And we like to end each and every show with a boom. And so without any further ado, 3, 2, 1, boom.

(Speaker 5)
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 5)
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 5)
I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization.

(Speaker 5)
We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. Hi, my name is Tim Johnson. I’m the owner of Tuscaloosa Ophthalmology, as well as Southern Eye Consultants, two ophthalmology practices in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And I’m a client of Clay Clark.

(Speaker 5)
He asked me to answer a couple of questions. The first question was, how did I hear about Clay Clark?

(Speaker 14)
I am a big fan of business podcasts, and his podcast popped up. as a recommended listening. So I started listening to the podcast. I was a little suspicious or skeptical because I thought there was going to be like an upcharge or an upsell, but the idea of the month -to -month canceling really appealed to me. And I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and for the upsell or for the scam to come in, but it never did. It’s very legitimate.

(Speaker 14)
Since working with Clay, I’ve gotten a much firmer grasp on how business works.

(Speaker 7)
Even in medicine, business is business. I’ve learned a lot about marketing, especially how Google reviews work and how important that is. That’s very important, even in medicine. At least once a week, if not every day, I get a new patient because somebody Googled eye doctor in Tuscaloosa. our ophthalmologist in Tuscaloosa. And you’d be amazed how many patients just look for an eye doctor that way.

(Speaker 7)
And so he’s really changed our business. Our business has grown a lot, maybe 15 to 20 % this year. And so we’re really grateful for the things he’s done for our business. And the last question was, when did I perfect the laugh? I would say that you can never perfect the laugh. You just keep working at it.

(Speaker 7)
And it just keeps getting better and better each day. But you got to keep working at it. Clay, my honor, my honor to be on your show. And thank you for all you do.

(Speaker 3)
I hear. The ripple effects from you are good ripple effects. You know what I mean? People rave about what they learn from you. So congratulations. to run a business more efficiently.

(Speaker 3)
The atmosphere is second to none. It’s a high energy, really cool atmosphere to be around. Contagious, I would say. Just something every entrepreneur, I think, would appreciate and love. I’d say humorous, high energy, and full of substance, which I think is the key. A lot of business coaches or seminars Maybe you’re high on motivation and making you feel good, but don’t have a lot of substance that you could take back and implement, you know, the following Monday, where his does.

(Speaker 3)
Man, there’s a lot of valuable things. I’m gonna say, like, I came to, this is my second workshop. The first workshop I took back, really, the importance of a group interview. I used to spend hours and hours interviewing people, screening resumes, and that, saving my time on that part is valuable. It was that and then the sales scripting that have been two major things just so far. I think they’re missing out on expert advice from somebody who’s been there done that built company.

(Speaker 3)
has learned a lot of lessons. You know, that’s what I’m always looking for is somebody that I can learn from that’s ahead of where I am. And I think if you choose not to come, you’re missing out on a lot of good advice that could help your business. willing to listen. In my career I’ve sold a little over 800 million dollars in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes.

(Speaker 3)
And then I met Clay, and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15 -year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of salespeople for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen.

(Speaker 3)
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 together. place with us, and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry.

(Speaker 3)
He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field.

(Speaker 6)
Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because The results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do.

(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. 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.

(Speaker 6)
I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 -year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us. And I know if you give them a shot, I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800 % increase in our Internet leads going from 10 a month to 180 a month. That would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot.

(Speaker 6)
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.

(Speaker 1)
It’s been tremendous.

(Speaker 34)
I can’t say enough about it.

(Speaker 1)
Carter keeps me accountable. He keeps me focused on working on the business and implementing things that we need to work on to keep growing the business. When we first started with you, I had four employees, and now I’m up to 10 employees. And it’s all because of the work we’re getting. We’re getting more and more work, Clay. I was suffocating.

(Speaker 32)
I was.

(Speaker 1)
like I said, I was doing the business since 2009 and everything was going through me. And at a point it’s, it’s a breaking point. And that’s where I think businesses just cave in and give up. And I found you on rumble and I started listening to you.

(Speaker 42)
And I think I told myself that it’s possible.

(Speaker 1)
This, this guy’s system is possible and I can see hope and I could, keep the business going. And I just encourage people, if you’re on the fence, get off the fence and try it. What do you have to gain? Everything. There’s a proven path. There’s a way to get through it.

(Speaker 1)
And there’s hope and the vision becomes clear. Okay, Aaron Antus, guess who’s joining us for the December 4th and 5th, 2025 Thrive Time Show Business Growth Workshop. Santa Claus? No, we will not be joined by Santa Claus, but we will be joined by Eric Trump, the son of the 45th and now 47th president of these United States. And yes, Amanda Grace will be in the place. And yes, Dr. Stella Manuel will be there, so you know it will go well.

(Speaker 1)
Yes, we have Mel Kaye in the house. Pastor Phil and Tammy Hotsenpiller will be hosting this event at their beautiful church right there in sunny Anaheim, California. Yes, folks, make this a December to remember.

(Speaker 3)
He’s fresh.

(Speaker 1)
Make this a December to remember and join us at the two day interactive business growth workshops.

(Speaker 35)
For over 20 years, folks, I’ve been hosting business growth workshops, where we’re going to teach you marketing, sales systems, human resources, accounting, social media marketing, branding, sales training, search engine optimization, accounting, workflow development, financial management, all this and more. How do you get tickets?

(Speaker 41)
Go to thrive .

(Speaker 40)
.com.

(Speaker 35)
com.

(Speaker 1)
Again, how do you get tickets? Go to ThriveTimeShow . com and request tickets today. Now, Eric Trump, people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees. There’s not 50 employees. The Trump Organization, again, most people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees.

(Speaker 1)
And while Donald J. Trump was the 45th president of these United States, and this just in from our home office president donald j trump is now the 47th president of these united states as well i’m on burgundy you need someone to run the companies for him and so the man that runs the trump organization for donald j trump as he was the 45th president of the united states and now the 47th president of the united states is eric trump so eric trump is here to talk about time management, promoting from within, marketing, branding, quality control, sales systems, workflow design, workflow mapping, how to build. I mean, everything that you see, the Trump hotels, the Trump golf courses, all their products, the man who manages Billions of dollars of real estate and thousands of employees is here to teach us how to do it. You are talking about one of the greatest brands on the planet from a business standpoint. I mean, who else has been able to create a brand like the Trump brand? I mean, look at it. And this is the man behind the business for the last, pretty much since 2015.

(Speaker 1)
He’s been the man behind it. So you’re talking, we’re into nine going into 10 years of him running it.

(Speaker 39)
And we get to tap into that knowledge.

(Speaker 38)
That’s going to be amazing.

(Speaker 1)
Now think about this for a second. Nothing is over until we decide it is. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? German? Forget it. He’s rolling.

(Speaker 1)
And it ain’t over now. 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 1)
Now, if you want to take a general admission ticket,

(Speaker 22)
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 1)
I grew up without money.

(Speaker 3)
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.

(Speaker 1)
And it’s $500 for a VIP ticket. Now, we only have limited seating here. There’s a lot of togetherness and closeness. camaraderie. So again, if you want to get tickets for this event, all you have to do is go to ThriveTimeShow . com, go to ThriveTimeShow .

(Speaker 1)
com. When you go to ThriveTimeShow .

(Speaker 21)
com, you’ll go there, you’ll request a ticket, boom. Or if you want to text me, if you want a little bit faster service, you say, I want you to call me right now.

(Speaker 1)
Just text my number. It’s my cell phone number. My personal cell phone number. We’ll keep that private between you, between you, me, everybody. We’ll keep that private. And anybody, don’t share that with anybody except for everybody.

(Speaker 1)
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. And so to be bilingually sensitive, my cell phone number is 918 -851 -0102. Zero tip.

(Speaker 1)
That is not actually bilingual. That’s just saying one for a one. It’s not the same thing. I think you’re attacking me. Now, let’s talk about this. Now, what kind of stuff will you learn at the Thrive Time Show Workshop?

(Speaker 1)
So, Aaron, you’ve been to many of these over the past seven, eight years. So let’s talk about it. I’ll tee up the thing and then you tell me what you’re going to learn here, OK? OK. You’re going to learn marketing, marketing and branding. What are we going to learn about marketing and branding?

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

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

(Speaker 1)
Aaron, you, you, I mean, 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, People are, you either have great people or you have people who suck. And so it can 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.

(Speaker 1)
And we have a process we teach about how to find great people. 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. 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.

(Speaker 1)
How do you manage your time? How do you get more done during a typical day? How do you build an organization if you’re not organized? 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.

(Speaker 1)
Now, let me tell you how the format is set up here. And again, folks, this is a two -day interactive 15. Think about this, folks.

(Speaker 35)
It’s two days.

(Speaker 1)
Each day, it starts at 7 AM, and it goes until 5 PM. So from 7 AM to 5 PM, two days. It’s a two -day interactive workshop. The way we do it is we do a 30 -minute teaching session, and then we break for 15 minutes for a question -and -answer session.

(Speaker 3)
So Aaron, what kind of great stuff stuff happens during that 15 minute question and answer session after every teaching session.

(Speaker 1)
I actually think it’s the best part about the workshops. 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.

(Speaker 36)
And it’s very specific to what your business is.

(Speaker 1)
And what we do is we allow you as the attendee to write your questions on the whiteboard.

(Speaker 37)
And then we literally, as you mentioned, we answer every single question on the whiteboard.

(Speaker 1)
And then we take a 15 minute break to stretch. And this is also your opportunity to meet some of the great speakers like Pastor Dave Scarlett. You could meet Mel K. You could meet Amanda Grace.

(Speaker 36)
You could meet Dr. Stella Emanuel.

(Speaker 1)
You could just grab a coffee. You could find some alone time. You could get lost in the bathroom. You could try to go and get a photo with one of the speakers. You could try to photobomb a photo where someone else is getting a photo with the speakers. You could go attempt to find your phone, wallet, and your keys.

(Speaker 1)
Now that’s a good idea. That means you have less than 3 % of our population that’s even self -employed. So you only have 3 out of every 100 people in America that are self -employed to begin with.

(Speaker 35)
And when Inc.

(Speaker 1)
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. That’s tough. But yet the average client that you and I work with, we can typically double this.

(Speaker 34)
I’m just no, no, no hyperbole.

(Speaker 4)
No exaggeration.

(Speaker 1)
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. Yeah. Double. And you say double.

(Speaker 1)
Yeah. There’s businesses that we have tripled. There’s businesses we’ve grown 8x. There’s so many examples you can see at Thrivetimeshow . com. But again, this is the most interactive best business workshop on the planet.

(Speaker 1)
This is objectively the highest rated and most reviewed business workshop on the planet. add to that Eric Trump, the man that runs the Trump organization.

(Speaker 2)
You say, Clay, I still I’m not going to get a ticket unless you give me more.

(Speaker 3)
OK, fine. We’re going to serve you the same meal both days. True story. We have we cater to the food. And because I keep it simple, I literally bring in the same food both days for lunch. Who’s with me?

(Speaker 3)
It was an incredible Mexican restaurant.

(Speaker 33)
That’s going to happen.

(Speaker 1)
Everyone says, I want more.

(Speaker 3)
This is not enough.

(Speaker 32)
Give me more.

(Speaker 1)
OK. I’m not going to mention their names right now because I’m working on it behind the scenes here.

(Speaker 20)
But we just continue to add more and more success stories. So if you’re out there today and you want to change your life, you want to give yourself an incredible gift, You want a life -changing experience.

(Speaker 1)
You want to learn how to start and grow a company.

(Speaker 3)
Go to Thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 31)
com.

(Speaker 1)
Go there right now. Thrivetimeshow . com. Request a ticket for the two -day interactive event.

(Speaker 19)
Again, the event’s going to be on December 4th and 5th in sunny Anaheim, California.

(Speaker 30)
Great weather.

(Speaker 19)
Make this a December to remember.

(Speaker 10)
Eric Trump, the man who leads the Trump Organization.

(Speaker 19)
It’s going to be a blasty blast. There’s no upsells. Aaron, I could not be more excited about this event.

(Speaker 18)
I think it is incredible. And there’s somebody out there right now.

(Speaker 7)
You’re watching and you’re like, but I already signed up for this incredible other program called

(Speaker 14)
Your Way to Thin.

(Speaker 7)
I think that’s going to change your life.

(Speaker 17)
I promise you this will be 10 times better than that.

(Speaker 4)
It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.

(Speaker 14)
Don’t do the smoke your way to thin conference. That is I’ve tried it. Don’t do it. Yeah. Chain smoking is not a viable.

(Speaker 4)
I mean, it is life changing.

(Speaker 17)
It is life changing. If you become a chain smoker, it is life changing. Best weight loss program.

(Speaker 4)
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 Thrive Time Show dot com. Again, that’s Aaron Antis.

(Speaker 14)
I’m Clay Clark and reminding you and inviting you to come out to the two -day interactive Thrive Time Show workshop in beautiful Anaheim, California.

(Speaker 29)
I’m from Sarasota, Florida.

(Speaker 2)
I’m Vince Suzuki, also from Sarasota, Florida. He dragged me here. Yup, I was here in 2018 and it changed my business and I built another business and now I’m here to do it again with this business. Yeah, I’m a brand strategist and it’s been really easy to go to a lot of events like this and just leave really in your head like what to do next. And already there’s the strategic, step -by -step, real -life implementation that we can do to our business, and I’m so grateful to be here. And I’m very excited that Eric Hump is here, and that is going to be epic.

(Speaker 2)
Hi, my name is Erica, and it has been amazing being here at the conference. I’m learning so much. Everything is perfect for me. Clay Clark, man, he is one character. That’s a good word for him, character.

(Speaker 28)
Yeah, that is it.

(Speaker 27)
Good, driven, smart, and I’ve never met a guy who was so hyper all the time.

(Speaker 2)
He’s doing so well. good.

(Speaker 9)
And then I met his mother and she just says, she just, she just lets him be Clay Clark. I mean, so, you know, he’s endorsed by his mother and he’s doing magnificent work. 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.

(Speaker 9)
He’s, he’s like, he’s, he’s a machine. He’s a machine. Yeah. But his, you know, I have problems with my company starting at 9 o ‘clock. He has hundreds of people showing up at 5 a . m.

(Speaker 14)
in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(Speaker 4)
Man, he’s a leader of a leader.

(Speaker 1)
He’s a fantastic young man. No, he is. And the greatest thing that will come out of all of it, aside from winning the presidency of the United States, we’ll get to that in a second.

(Speaker 25)
Was an everlasting friendship between clay and I because I’m telling you there’s not too many people in the world that have this man’s backbone and his Tenaciousness and his perseverance and so buddy.

(Speaker 26)
I love you and to general Flynn.

(Speaker 1)
Thank you. You guys are incredible You guys are incredible warriors. You guys are incredible incredible warrior. So thank thank you my friend plate Clark is here somewhere Where’s my buddy play plays the greatest? I met his goats today. I met his dogs.

(Speaker 1)
I met his chickens. I saw his compound. He’s like the greatest guy. I ran from his goats, his chickens, his dogs. So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right? His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing.

(Speaker 1)
4 ,000 % from February to February. Now I can better that.

(Speaker 2)
Okay, Clay, I don’t think you know this. I don’t think you know this. I’m pinching myself and if I cry, forgive me. In the last two and a half days, we have bettered our intentions. month of February. In the last two and a half days.

(Speaker 2)
So, and the phone’s blowing up. Everything’s just blowing up. You’re right, it is like a rocket ship. So, we’re pinching ourselves, actually. I learned at the Academy, at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say.

(Speaker 2)
We’re going to move into action mode here. So for anybody out there, if you say, I would like to go to Mar -a -Lago. Now, Jackson, you know, this just in, they raided Mar -a -Lago. You know about this? This just in. And so some people say, you know, that wasn’t cool.

(Speaker 2)
I didn’t like that. But you know, so a lot of people out there, we want to kind of stick it to The New York Times. We want Eric to become the number one best -selling author in America. And we also, we kind of also want to go to Mar -a -Lago and check it out. We’ve never been there before. So what we’re going to do is for anybody right now, if you go to Amazon right now and you buy a copy of Eric Trump’s book, Under Siege, My Family’s to save our nation.

(Speaker 2)
So you go to Amazon right now, you buy a copy of the book.

(Speaker 1)
and you just text a screenshot of your proof of purchase to my cell phone number, 918 -851 -0102. So text my number, 918 -851 -0102. So again, step one, you go here to amazon . com, you buy a copy of the book Under Siege, then you just text a screenshot of your purchase, your proof of purchase. You text my number, 918 -851 -0102.

(Speaker 25)
You have a chance to win a dinner at Mar -a -Lago with Eric Trump and myself, and there’s more.

(Speaker 1)
Mar -a -Lago right there, just for your viewers. It’s the most exclusive private club in the world. $2 million to get into, just base membership fee. And I promise, we’re going to make your night absolutely incredible. The play goes, listen, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we put it out to all the amazing Reawaken people, all the people who supported us all around the country, all around, at every one of these conferences, who adore your family.

(Speaker 1)
We’ve got to beat The New York Times. The New York Times is going to do everything they can. Even though we’re number one on Amazon right now, we just hit number one this morning. New York Times is going to do everything they can to keep you from being number one bestseller. You know that. I know that.

(Speaker 1)
You know the games that they’re willing to play. But Clay goes, why don’t we do a couple of things? First of all, I love having dinner with Clay.

(Speaker 24)
He’s the greatest.

(Speaker 1)
Second of all, why don’t we bring one of the amazing people that I guarantee you I’ve been in front of at all these events. Why don’t we bring a couple to dinner at Mar -a -Lago?”

(Speaker 2)
And I said, absolutely, consider it done.

(Speaker 1)
So I said, they have to text you, Clay. They can’t text me, because we’ll be getting 1 ,000 of these. But yeah, go buy a book. Text Clay. And we’ll set up a dinner. I’ll make sure you guys have the absolute time of your life.

(Speaker 1)
I want to pull this up again one more time here, Jackson. I think sometimes I’m a poor communicator, and I need to work on communicating more effectively. So you go to Amazon. That’s step one, OK? Yes. You buy a copy of the book, Pop Quiz.

(Speaker 1)
What book? Under Siege. You buy a copy of Under Siege, and then you screenshot a picture of that, and you text my phone number. It’s 918 -851 -0102. Folks, that is my cell phone number. So we’ll keep that private between you and me and everybody.

(Speaker 1)
And then when you text that to me, you have a chance to win a backstage pass to the actual in -person business workshop. That’s a business growth workshop, December 4th and 5th, featuring Eric Trump in Anaheim, California. and you have a chance to win dinner with Eric Trump and myself at Mar -a -Lago. Now, someone says, when does this contest end? Now, Eric, your birthday was hijacked, OK? So your birthday was hijacked.

(Speaker 1)
January 6th is this man’s birthday. He now has to switch his birthday, because no one wants to talk about his birthday on January 6th anymore. So we’re going to run this promotion until November 5th. That’s my birthday. No, no. So we’re going to run it until October 14th.

(Speaker 2)
October 14th. It has to be pre -sale. This just in. It has to be between October 14th. That’s why we’re clarifying. So between now and October October 14th.

(Speaker 2)
Now, folks, let me just clarify this real quick here, so make sure I’m leaving you with some good clarity here. One, you buy a copy of Under Siege on Amazon. That’s the step one. Step two, you text a screenshot of that purchase to my cell phone number, 918 -851 -0102. Three, you have to do that before October 14th. Before October 14th, this just in, it has to be before October 14th.

(Speaker 2)
And you have a chance to win a backstage pass to the upcoming business workshop. You have a chance to have dinner with Eric Trump at Mar -a -Lago. And I want to tell you some benefits of buying the book. One, I’ve read the book. It’s incredible. If you’re a father out there and you want to learn about mentoring your kids, it’s a great book.

(Speaker 2)
If you want to learn about American history, it’s a great book. If you want to make America great again, it is a great book. It’s a book you got to have. Now here is just a quick editor’s note. You do not have to buy a copy of Eric Trump’s book Under Siege to be entered into the drawing. Just text the number.

(Speaker 2)
All you have to do is just text the number 918 -851 -0102 and you will be entered into the drawing for a chance to win a copy of Eric Trump’s book Under Siege and a once in a lifetime opportunity to to hang out with Eric Trump and Clay Clark at Mar -a -Lago, and to win a backstage pass at the upcoming Thrivetimeshow . com two -day interactive business workshop. Again, you do not have to buy a copy of the book to be entered into the drawing, but it would be great if you’d buy a copy of the book, because that would make sense. However, that is all, and now back to the interview. Also, Eric, a final question here for you. You are donating a portion of the proceeds to support Charlie Kirk in his continued mission there.

(Speaker 2)
Could you tell us about that briefly there? And then we’ll let you get back to what you’re doing today, sir. Yeah, well, I was on with Benny Johnson. Benny Johnson was a great friend of Charlie Kirk’s, as you know. And you know Benny. And Benny’s a very good friend of mine.

(Speaker 2)
And Kash Patel is a very good friend of mine and was a very good friend of Charlie’s. you watch everybody else up on that stage every single day as they as they got to the bottom of exactly what happened and they brought justice to what happened or trying to bring justice to what happened. And it’s it’s it’s kind of unthinkable. But you know St. Jude and I talk a lot about St. Jude in this this book because it’s been you know fighting pediatric cancer has always been at you know a big of my life.

(Speaker 1)
But Charlie truly, truly, truly was the epitome of being under siege, not only in the movement that he helped create, But obviously in how his life was savagely taken. My book came out three days, two and a half days before Charlie’s assassination. You better believe he would have been the final chapter of this book as just another illustration of what these people will do at any cost. to try and win because it’s who they are. It’s the not -so -tolerant left. And we can never let our voices be extinguished, Clay.

(Speaker 1)
You stood on that stage as well as anybody I’ve ever seen stand on a stage. You did our Reawaken events all across the country, which you funded out of your back pocket because you believed in America.

(Speaker 2)
You believed in a greater country. And you were on that stage every single day. You know I was on that stage with you every single day. And I was on the turning point stage with Charlie all the time. on stages across the country and three campaigns. I’ve stood on thousands of them.

And honestly, they don’t want us to stand on that stage. That’s why they’re sending bullets from rooftops. They don’t want us to go out there with a bullhorn and have loud, independent thought. When they see these beautiful arenas full of kids and they’re cheering, they’re celebrating, they’re holding American flags, they don’t want that. And so they want to silence us. They want to silence our voice.

That’s why they killed Charlie. That’s why they tried to kill my father. That’s why they sent 112 subpoenas to me. That’s why they wanted me in jail and my father in jail and Don in jail. That’s why they made up the hoaxes. They wanted to see us destroyed and gone with no voice, with no money, with no company, with no political aspirations, gone.

And we can’t allow that to happen. And so we need to make sure that turning point continues. We need to make sure incredible patriots like you continue to spread sensical speech, pro -American values, pro -religious, pro -constitutional values. And that’s why I want to donate the funds to Turning Point. I want to donate a portion of the funds to Turning Point because we can’t allow anarchy to win, and we can’t allow voices to be deleted, and we need to keep Charlie’s legacy going.

Eric Trump, thank you so much for joining us. Pastor Jackson, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. Eric, have a great day. We really do appreciate you. Everybody go out there and buy that book, Under Seed.

It’s not too early to buy your Christmas gifts. And if you have a Democrat in your family, buy them a copy as well. Eric Trump, take care. Thanks, guys. See you later.

Transcribed with Cockatoo