Business Coach | How to Grow & Scale a Large Organization With Pastor Craig Groeschel | Discover the Systems Used to Grow from a 2-Car Garage to a 100,000 Person Church + Discover 2 EPIC Clay Clark Client Success Stories

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

(Speaker 1)
Pastor Craig Groeschel, the pastor of the largest Protestant church in America, shares how he’s willing to do anything short of sin to lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ. The importance of mixing emotion with truth to move people. Why Michael Jackson’s man in the mirror was playing in the lobby of his church. How excellence honors God and brings value. The systems needed to grow, one of the largest organizations on the planet. How he holds people accountable and how he stays in great shape without steroids.

(Speaker 1)
And so much more.

(Speaker 7)
Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men, eight kids, co -created by two different women, 13 multi -million dollar businesses.

(Speaker 6)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Thriving Time Show.

(Speaker 1)
Welcome on to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show we are interviewing Dr. Z. We are interviewing a guy who I have known a lot about, heard a lot about, because he is now known as the pastor of of the largest Protestant church in the United States with over 30 campuses.

(Speaker 2)
It’s a big deal.

(Speaker 1)
And because we’re entrepreneurs, we love the startup story. Rumor has it, they started the church in a two -car garage equipped with a borrowed overhead projector and two construction lights they bought for the low, low price of $19 .99 from Lowe’s. And today, he is a father of six kids, and these guys are known, Z, as being the inventors of the Bible app. The Bible app, it’s called the YouVersion Bible app, that’s now been downloaded over 200 million times.

(Speaker 31)
Wow.

(Speaker 1)
And he’s just released his newest book, Hope in the Dark, Believing God is Good When Life is Not. Pastor Craig Groeschel, how are you, sir?

(Speaker 4)
Hey, Clay, Dr. Z, I’m honored to be on. I’m doing fantastic here. Thank you.

(Speaker 1)
Hey, your newest book, I want to get to that in a minute, but I think there’s a lot of people listening saying, how in the world does somebody start a church in a two -car garage with a projector and grow it into 30 campuses? Can you share with us when you had the vision to grow the church like it’s grown today?

(Speaker 4)
I never had the vision to grow the church like it has today, and not even anywhere close. In fact, to think that it could have more than a thousand people in one location was would’ve been a dream come true just to impact that many lives. Now, we started back in 1996, and the garage was actually an upgrade. We were going to start in my home, but I was out for a jog three days before we started and bumped into some friends that had a little, it was like a work garage where they repaired cars that they transformed into a makeshift dance studio. And they offered us to meet there, so we met in there. The great thing is they had mirrors up, so whenever 40 people showed up, it looked like 80.

(Speaker 4)
And we were pretty excited about that.

(Speaker 1)
That’s hilarious. Now, I want to ask you this, because the first time I watched one of your sermons, you had a sermon where you were talking about demon possession. And you were unapologetic about it. You were teaching the Bible. We’re in a digital age. And so you have found a way to charge hard into the digital age

(Speaker 1)
while still teaching biblical truths. And I thought, here’s a guy who’s the most relevant pastor in America, but you’re not dumbing down the message, watering it down. You’re not avoiding uncomfortable subjects. How have you been able to stay true to biblical truths while growing in the digital age? I just want to hear that because I know there’s a lot of pastors out there that feel like in order to grow a church today, you have to change your message up.

(Speaker 4)
Well, I think for years, people came to church because they were interested in church. That’s just what they did. And then a generation, kind of like maybe my age, started waking up saying, I’m not sure we want to do this. What’s the value with the benefit?” And so people kind of drifted from a presupposition of maybe believing in God and that church was a normal part of life. And so I think the pendulum swung from, let’s just do traditional church and people are going to come, to let’s go get creative and try to take a message that will never change, but let’s present it in a way that grabs the attention of people that maybe don’t care about church or not as interested in God.

(Speaker 4)
you know, in my language in the church world, it went from being traditional to crazy contemporary. In my mind, the package is never what really matters. It’s always the content of the package. And so what we want to do is we want to adapt the package as the world changes, use whatever we have to get the message out. But the message is the heartbeat of it. When I’m working with pastors, I hope we all agree that we’re not going to water something down.

(Speaker 4)
We’re not going to soften it. We’re not going to teach an easy message. We’re going to teach an accurate and life -changing message. But then we’re going to use any and every means possible. For example, you talk to thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs with a podcast. Why in the world would we not take

(Speaker 4)
the message that we have and leverage it through podcasts? And so we like to just say, you know, we’ll leverage and redeem technology to impact people. And a real popular saying around here is this, we’ll do anything short of sin to reach people that don’t know Christ. And to reach people no one’s reaching, we’re going to have to do things no one’s doing. So we have tried some things that maybe are a little bit different and have been controversial to some, but I’d rather go down swinging than go down watching the pitch go by.

(Speaker 8)
Well, I really appreciate one of the things that you’re swinging at, and that is your series on At The Movies. How did you get inspired to do that? What triggered in your brain? I mean, tell me a little bit about the background, because I think that’s just fabulous, by the way.

(Speaker 4)
So I love movies. I love to kind of disappear, let my mind check out, and just love good, great, high -quality entertainment. What I recognize, and you guys probably do this too because you’re fun, you’re engaging, you’re entertaining in what you do, content alone or information typically doesn’t move people to action. And you guys are great at this. What you want to do is you want to create an emotion that matches a truth or an idea to inspire your entrepreneurs. to attempt something they haven’t done before.

(Speaker 4)
That’s what I wanted to do without the movies. What we did was, I’d sit in a movie and I’d find myself in a great one, I’d be crying my eyes out, trying to act like I’m not crying so my wife doesn’t see me. Was it Little Mermaid? Yeah, Little Mermaid or Bingey or whatever, Bambi, I’d cry. Or I’d find myself punching the air in some great movie, cheering, ready to go take on the world in a fight or whatever. And the emotion was very real, so what I wanted to do is I wanted to mix emotion with truth.

(Speaker 4)
And so from the outside, sometimes people will misunderstand and criticize the series. What we’re doing is we’re trying to illustrate truth from Scripture with clips from movies. And then we’ve kind of created like a seamless teaching where we use in and out of clips for movies and teaching, and put together about a 30 or 35 minute visual presentation of truth with music and emotions and clips. And the Church grows during that time by about 25 ,000 people. You know, more people come to it because they bring their friends, and it’s an entry point for people that might not ever normally come to church, and then we always follow it up with kind of an in -your -face, different style of teaching.

(Speaker 4)
And so it is a hook, and then hopefully it’s a hook that brings people into something that’s special. My PR representative, his name is Michael Levine, and he’s represented Prince, and Michael Jackson, and like 58 Academy Award winners. Then, see, he made a poor life choice and decided to represent me. and Michael Levine, you know, is a big Michael Jackson guy. So I was mystery shopping your church in preparation for hoping that you would accept our request to interview you, and you hadn’t accepted it yet, so I did it on faith. I went to the East Broken Arrow campus, and I went out there, and I walk in, and the song I heard was A Man in the Mirror. And I thought, wait a minute, a man in the mirror is playing before the church service, what’s going on?

(Speaker 4)
So I went back the next week, because I was like, what is happening?

(Speaker 7)
What’s happening?

(Speaker 1)
And something was happening. And I went back, and I can’t remember the song you did the second week, but I’ve noticed you’re very intentional about playing a secular song in the lobby as people are kind of gathering before the service starts. Can you talk to us about why you do that?

(Speaker 4)
Like you said, we’ve got 31 different campuses, and they have the freedom, as long as the songs are what I would call neutral to positive, meaning you can’t sing something about somebody killing people and smoking weed. stuff like that. I thought, let’s get it on, that was kind of weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one didn’t get played twice, right? So, they’ve got the choice, if there’s something that ties into a theme that’s going on in the message, before the server starts, and the band can pull it off and do it in a real high -quality way, but they’ve got permission to make the call. So whatever you saw, actually happened outside of my knowledge.

(Speaker 4)
If it was good, I’ll brag on them. If you tell me it wasn’t good, I’ll go have a conversation with somebody. But it’s a way for people that maybe don’t normally go to church to go, oh, I know that song, I like that. And it happens before the service, it’s meant to disarm them a little bit, and then the tone changes significantly to something that’s going to be intentionally unapologetically spiritual. But that’s what some of the different church locations will do.

(Speaker 1)
A deep thought I had for you, just one little critique, is the band is awesome, but they need more cowbell on the track.

(Speaker 4)
Always more cowbell.

(Speaker 26)
A little more cowbell.

(Speaker 1)
All right, Dr. Z, you had a hot question.

(Speaker 4)
You were ready for that one.

(Speaker 38)
I was, I was.

(Speaker 8)
Pastor Craig, looking at, I know a church isn’t a business, but just kind of for the entrepreneurs out there looking at it, we have a lot of successful entrepreneurs and they are looking at opening up a second location or a third location or multiple locations. And we get a lot of questions, we get a lot of emails about that. What do I need to look for? And one of the things you just touched on right there, which I thought was kind of a neat point, is how much freedom do you give your campus? and like you said, they’re picking the songs and whatnot, but when you went from your one location to then all of a sudden starting to do these multiple locations, walk our entrepreneurs through there, what’s some of the issues with and some of the ways you tackle them.

(Speaker 4)
So that’s a great, great question. So I work with churches all the time and it’s almost getting popular to have, how many campuses do you have, like a calling card? I start with trying to talk them out of it before talking them into it because, you know, it’s just like, any of your businesses. If you start too soon, too weak, you’re going to compromise the whole thing. So you’ve got to make sure you start right.

(Speaker 4)
Then what you want to do is you’ve got to have a real tension between flexibility and control. In the early stages, you don’t know what you’re doing. And so you don’t want to ask yourself, what do you want to duplicate at the next location? If there’s something that you don’t want to duplicate, you’re going to want to ask yourself, why are we doing it in the first location? That’s a really important stage because you may find that you’re doing some things you probably shouldn’t be doing that gives you permissions to start cleaning up. then what is it where the places that what you will give uh… them to kind of a wide parameters a lot of play within the boundaries and one of the things that you’re unwilling to compromise on i could put your right recommend in the early stages of organizational growth if you if you go higher on control lower on flexibility because you haven’t developed a system yet where people know how to think for themselves so you can think for them uh… be heavy on systems Then over time, when you’ve got 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20 locations, whatever, you develop the systems that are in place, and then you start to give select leaders a little bit more freedom.

(Speaker 4)
Because if you always control them, you’re going to train them to think like managers rather than leaders. We don’t want people to just do what they’re told. We want people to think, to create, to innovate. And so we’re going to loosen up a little bit on the grip. Then, once you’ve really got well -established systems, you can kind of pick and choose. These are the things, like in my organization, CanvasPastor needs to be done at 2100 into the service because that’s when it goes live to satellite.

(Speaker 4)
There’s no flexibility in that whatever. You have to hit that time mark. What you do going up to that time mark might give you a little bit of flexibility. And so you’ll really nail down what are the things that we have to have. It might be a certain type of customer service. It might be what we say when someone comes in.

(Speaker 4)
It might be how fast we ship the product. These are the things that we will never compromise on. But over time, in a good organization, we’ll want to We want to be intentionally heavy with some systems, but we want to be intentionally flexible to give our great leaders room to create and make it better.

(Speaker 1)
Pastor Craig, at your church services that I’ve been to, my background, I started one of America’s largest entertainment companies for weddings back in the day called DJConnection .

(Speaker 40)
com.

(Speaker 1)
I exited the company, we were doing about 4 ,000 weddings a year at the time, and I recognize great audio. I walk in and it’s like the dojo of Mojo. You guys have great audio there. But I go to the church I grew up in, in rural Minnesota. Great people, but their typical Z, the band would consist of like a woodblock.

(Speaker 3)
Oh yeah.

(Speaker 1)
And it would be a song like, farther along. And the person really can’t sing, but they’re just going with it because the main singer couldn’t make it. Or the drummer hadn’t yet gone through rhythm therapy, so he couldn’t drum on beat either. And I’m not kidding. It was the weirdest thing ever. And there was no standard of excellence.

(Speaker 1)
So I want to ask you some really tough questions. And if you don’t like them, I’ll pick up that you don’t like them when you hang up. So here we go. If you have a certain standard of excellence and somebody fails to hit the time mark that you just mentioned, or they don’t show up for rehearsals, or they just mail it in emotionally, Mentally, they’re not going for the excellence that you want to provide. They’re not working as unto the Lord, they’re maybe working as unto some guy named Lou. Pastor Craig Groeschel, the pastor of the largest Protestant church in America, shares how he’s willing to do anything short of sin to lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ.

(Speaker 1)
The importance of mixing emotion with truth to move people. Why Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror was playing in the lobby of his church. How excellence honors God and brings value. The systems needed to grow, one of the largest organizations on the planet. How he holds people accountable and how he stays in great shape without steroids and so much more.

(Speaker 7)
Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show but this show does. Two men. Eight kids co -created by two different women. Thirteen multi -million dollar businesses.

(Speaker 6)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Thrive Time Show.

(Speaker 1)
Welcome on to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we are interviewing, Dr. Z, we are interviewing a guy who I have known a lot about, heard a lot about, because he is now known as the pastor of the largest Protestant church in the United States with over 30 campuses.

(Speaker 3)
It’s a big deal.

(Speaker 1)
And because we’re entrepreneurs, we love the startup story. Rumor has it they started the church in a two -car garage equipped with a borrowed overhead projector and two construction lights they bought for the low, low price of $19 .99 from Lowe’s. And today he is a father of six kids and these guys are known, Z, as being the inventors of the Bible app. The Bible app, it’s called the YouVersion Bible app, that’s now been downloaded over 200 million times. Wow. And he’s just released his newest book, Hope in the Dark, Believing God is Good When Life is Not.

(Speaker 4)
Pastor Craig Rochelle, how are you, sir? Hey, Clay, Dr. Z, I’m honored to be on. I’m doing fantastic here.

(Speaker 1)
Thank you. Hey, your newest book, I want to get to that in a minute, but I think there’s a lot of people listening saying, how in the world does somebody start a church in a two -car garage with a projector and grow it into 30 campuses?

(Speaker 4)
Can you share with us when you had the vision to grow the church like it’s grown today? I never had the vision to grow the church like it has today, and not even anywhere close. In fact, to think that it could have more than a thousand people in one location was would’ve been a dream come true just to impact that many lives. Now we started back in 1996 and the garage was actually an upgrade. We were going to start in my home, but I was out for a jog three days before we started and bumped into some friends that had a little, it was like a work garage where they repaired cars that they transformed into a makeshift dance studio. And they offered us to meet there, so we met in there.

(Speaker 4)
The great thing is they had mirrors up, so whenever 40 people showed up, it looked like 80.

(Speaker 1)
And we were pretty excited about that. That’s hilarious. Now, I want to ask you this, because the first time I watched one of your sermons, you had a sermon where you were talking about demon possession. And you were unapologetic about it. You were teaching the Bible. We’re in a digital age.

(Speaker 1)
And so you have found a way to charge hard into the digital age while still teaching biblical truths. And I thought, here’s a guy who’s the most relevant pastor in America, but you’re not dumbing down the message, watering it down. You’re not avoiding uncomfortable subjects. How have you been able to stay true to biblical truths while growing in the digital age? I just want to hear that because I know there’s a lot of pastors out there that feel like in order to grow a church today,

(Speaker 4)
have to change your message up. Well I think for years people came to church because they were interested in church. That’s just what they did. And then a generation kind of like maybe my age sort of waking up saying this is I’m not sure we want to do this. What’s the value? What’s the benefit?

(Speaker 4)
And so people kind of drifted from a presupposition of maybe believing in God and the church was a normal part of life. And so I think the pendulum swung from, let’s just do traditional church and people are going to come, to let’s go get creative and try to take a message that will never change, but let’s present it in a way that grabs the attention of people that maybe don’t care about church or not as interested in God. you know, in my language in the church world, it went from being traditional to crazy contemporary. In my mind, the package is never what really matters. It’s always the content of the package. And so what we want to do is we want to adapt the package as the world changes use whatever we have uh… ticket the message out of the message is is the heartbeat of it and so you know when i’m working with pastors that we always try to do you know i hope we all agree that we’re going to water something downward and we’re going to fall for that we’re not going to uh… teaching easy message we’re teaching accurate and life -changing message but then we’re going to use any and every means possible and for example you talk to you know thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs for the podcast Why in the world would we not take the message that we have and leverage it through podcasts?”

(Speaker 4)
And so we like to just say, you know, we’ll leverage and redeem technology to impact people. And a real popular saying around here is this, we’ll do anything short of sin to reach people that don’t know Christ. And to reach people no one’s reaching, we’re going to have to do things no one’s doing. So we have tried some things that may

(Speaker 8)
are a little bit different and have been controversial to some, but I’d rather go down swinging than go down watching the pitch go by. Well, I really appreciate one of the things that you’re swinging at, and that is your series on At The Movies. How did you get inspired to do that? What triggered in your brain?

(Speaker 4)
Give me a little bit of the background on that, because I think that’s just fabulous, by the way. I love movies. I love to kind of disappear, love my mind check out, and just love good, great, high -quality entertainment. What I recognize, and you guys probably do this, too, because you’re fun, you’re engaging, you’re entertaining in what you do. Content alone or information typically doesn’t move people to action, and you guys are great at this. What you want to do is you want to create an emotion that matches a truth or an idea to inspire your entrepreneurs.

(Speaker 4)
to attempt something they haven’t done before. That’s what I wanted to do without the movies. What we did was, I’d sit in a movie and I’d find myself in a great one. I’d be crying my eyes out, trying to act like I’m not crying so my wife doesn’t see me. Was it Little Mermaid? Yeah, Little Mermaid or Bingey or whatever, Bambi, I’d cry.

(Speaker 4)
Or I’d find myself punching the air in some great movie, cheering, ready to go take on the world in a fight or whatever. And the emotion was very real, so what I wanted to do is I wanted to mix emotion with truth. And so from the outside, sometimes people will misunderstand and criticize the series.

(Speaker 21)
What we’re doing is we’re trying to illustrate truth from Scripture with clips from movies, and then we’ve kind of created like a seamless teaching where we use in and out of clips for movies and teaching, and put together about a 30 or 35 minute visual presentation of truth with music and emotions and clips, and the church grows during that time by about 25 ,000 people.

(Speaker 4)
Wow. More people come to it because they bring their friends, and it’s an entry point for people that might not ever normally come to church. And then we always follow it up with kind of an interface, different style of teaching.

(Speaker 1)
And so it is a hook. And then hopefully it’s a hook that brings people into something that’s special. My PR representative, his name is Michael Levine, and he’s represented Prince and Michael Jackson and like 58 Academy Award winners. Then he made a poor life choice and decided to represent me. And Michael Levine, you know, is a big Michael Jackson guy. So I was mystery shopping your church in preparation for hoping that you would accept our request to interview you.

(Speaker 1)
And you hadn’t accepted it yet. So I did it on faith. I went to the East Broken Arrow Campus. And I went out there, and I walk in, and the song I heard was A Man in the Mirror. And I thought, wait a minute, A Man in the Mirror is playing before the church service, what’s going on? So I went back the next week, because I was like, what is happening?

(Speaker 1)
What’s happening? And something was happening. And I went back, and I can’t remember the song you did the second week, but I’ve noticed you’re very intentional about playing a secular song in the lobby as people are kind of gathering before the service starts.

(Speaker 4)
Can you talk to us about why you do that? So, like you said, we’ve got 31 different campuses, and they have the freedom, as long as the songs are what I would call neutral to positive, meaning you can’t sing something about somebody. you know killer killing people and do it you know smoking weed but i i i i i i i let’s get let’s get it on that was that was kind of weird if you want to look at it yeah i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i actually happened outside of my knowledge. If it was good, I’ll brag on them. If you tell me it wasn’t good, I’ll go have a conversation with somebody.

(Speaker 4)
But it’s a way for people that maybe don’t normally go to church to go, oh man, I know that song, I like that. And it happens before the service, it’s meant to disarm them a little bit, and then the tone changes significantly to something that’s going to be intentionally unapologetically spiritual.

(Speaker 1)
But that’s what some of the different church locations will do.

(Speaker 4)
A deep thought I had for you, just one little critique, is the band is awesome, but they need more cowbell on the track.

(Speaker 26)
A little more cowbell.

(Speaker 1)
A little more cowbell.

(Speaker 4)
All right, Dr. Z, you had a hot question.

(Speaker 38)
You were ready for that one.

(Speaker 8)
I was, I was. Pastor Craig, looking at, I know a church isn’t a business, but just kind of for the entrepreneurs out there looking at it, we have a lot of successful entrepreneurs and they are looking at opening up a second location, or a third location, or multiple locations. And we get a lot of questions, we get a lot of emails about that. What do I need to look for?

(Speaker 4)
And one of the things you just touched on right there, which I thought was kind of a neat point, is how much freedom do you give your campus and like you said, they’re picking the songs and whatnot, but when you went from your one location to then all of a sudden starting to do these multiple locations, walk our entrepreneurs through there, what some of the issues with and some of the ways you tackle them. So that’s a great, great question. So I work with churches all the time and it’s almost getting popular to have, how many campuses do you have, like a calling card? I start with trying to talk them out of it before talking them into it because it’s It’s just like any of your businesses. If you start too soon, too weak, you’re going to compromise the whole thing. So you’ve got to make sure you start right.

(Speaker 4)
Then what you want to do is you’ve got to have a real tension between flexibility and control. In the early stages, you don’t know what you’re doing. And so you don’t want to ask yourself, what do you want to duplicate at this point? If there’s something that you don’t want to duplicate, you’re going to want to ask yourself, why are we doing it at the first location? That’s a really important stage, because you may find that you’re doing some things you probably shouldn’t be doing. That gives you permissions to start cleaning up.

(Speaker 4)
Then what is it, where are the places that you will give them to kind of wide parameters and let them play within the boundaries, and what are the things that you’re unwilling to compromise on? I typically recommend in the early stages of organizational growth is that you go higher on control, lower on flexibility, because you haven’t developed a system yet where people know how to think for themselves. So you’re going to think for them, be heavy on systems, Then over time, when you’ve got 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20 locations, whatever, you develop the systems that are in place. And then you start to give select leaders a little bit more freedom. Because if you always control them, you’re going to train them to think like managers rather than leaders. We don’t want people to just do what they’re told.

(Speaker 4)
We want people to think, to create, to innovate. And so we’re going to loosen up a little bit on the grip. Then once you’ve really got well -established systems, you can kind of pick and choose. These are the things, like in my organization, campus pastor needs to be done at 2100 into the service because that’s when it goes live to satellite. There’s no flexibility in that whatever. You have to hit that time mark.

(Speaker 4)
What you do going up to that time mark might give you a little bit of flexibility. And so you’ll really nail down what are the things that we have to have. It might be a certain type of customer service. It might be what we say when someone comes in. It might be how fast we ship the product. These are the things that we will never compromise on.

(Speaker 1)
But over time, in a good organization, we’ll want to be intentionally heavy with some systems, but we want to be intentionally flexible to give our great leaders room to create and make it better. Pastor Craig, at your church services that I’ve been to, my background, I started one of America’s largest entertainment companies for weddings back in the day called DJConnection .com. com. I exited the company. We were doing about 4 ,000 weddings a year at the time.

(Speaker 1)
I recognize great audio. I walk in and it’s like the dojo of mojo. You guys have great audio there. But I go to the church I grew up in, in rural Minnesota, great people, but their typical Z, the band would consist of like a woodblock, and it’d be a song like, farther along, and the person really can’t sing, but they’re just going with it because the main singer couldn’t make it, or the drummer hadn’t yet gone through rhythm therapy, so he couldn’t drum on beat either, and I’m not kidding, it was the weirdest thing ever, and there was no standard of excellence. So I wanna ask you some really tough questions, and if you don’t like them all, pick up that you don’t like them when you hang up. So here we go.

(Speaker 1)
If you have a certain standard of excellence and somebody fails to hit the time mark that you just mentioned, or they don’t show up for rehearsals, or they just mail it in emotionally, mentally, they’re not going for the excellence that you want to provide. They’re not working as unto the Lord.

(Speaker 4)
They’re maybe working as unto some guy named Lou. How do you deal with it when people fail to perform as a matter of choice? Yeah, well, we didn’t come up with it, but we say excellence honors God and inspires people. It’s a value. And so we’re going to bring our best in them some. If someone doesn’t do what’s expected, doesn’t rehearse well, doesn’t have what it takes, then the first time we’re going to warn them.

(Speaker 4)
The second time, if they don’t do it, eventually it’s no longer their problem. It’s my problem as a leader. And so we’re going to hold people to the highest standards. We’re not going to make excuses. People say, well, you’re supposed to be at church. You must be loving.

(Speaker 4)
It’s not loving to let someone do something without excellence when we’re really trying to reach people. So we have high standards.

(Speaker 1)
We’re going to be fast to give honest feedback. high feedback culture, and that’s how we get better and that’s how we make sure things are done right. Now, Z, this is the question that could really, really irritate pastors. I’m asking these tough questions because a lot of people never ask pastors about hiring and firing people. I have another one here for you. I feel like, and if this is a bad description, just let me know, I feel like you’re kind of like a sitcom pastor.

(Speaker 4)
If I had to choose a word for you, you know, it’s like typically, you know, you start off and you introduce a problem and the characters and then you solve it and we all leave feeling good, but then your newest book doesn’t read at all like you normally preach. Can you talk to me about, would you classify yourself typically as a sitcom pastor, or am I a very bad person for even asking that question? Yeah, you’re a very bad person for asking that question. Yeah, I think most sermons probably are some variation of a sitcom sermon, meaning, you know, here’s a problem, here’s what Scripture says, here’s kind of a solution, an application, and it’s, you know, problem solved in 30 minutes or less, including commercial breaks. So the challenge is, if every message I preach is a sitcom story, I’m probably not being faithful to scripture.

(Speaker 3)
And so many times, in fact, the book I wrote, and I joked about it, is this is not a sitcom message at all. The book’s called Hope in the Dark, and the subtitle’s Believing God is Good When Life is Not. I’m Glenn Shaw, owner of Shaw Homes in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Started the company in 1985. At that time it was one employee doing everything, me. I met Aaron Antus in 2007. The top three things that Aaron did for Shaw Homes was he brought in processes that helped us be able to repeat over and over.

(Speaker 3)
He brought in unique hiring skills. He was able to find the right people for the right seat on the bus. And Aaron brought sales techniques that we weren’t familiar with up until that time. When Aaron came, we were selling about 80, 85 houses a year. And during the 16 -year period, we solved sales get up over 400. Before I met Aaron, the only sales manager we had was myself, and I was completely unable to perform that job.

(Speaker 3)
And so Aaron brought major changes and great results with him. In the many years that I was building houses before Aaron, I was great at selling if somebody wanted to buy, but they had to be knocking on my door asking me to sell them a house before I could actually make that sell. I had no sales techniques and no ability to generate sales. Aaron coming in as a natural salesperson just absolutely transformed that and made the sales experience better for the company and better for our buyers. Prior to Aaron, I would work all week for the company. I’d sit in the model home over the weekend.

(Speaker 3)
And I had a salesperson or two, but I was actually out there all weekend working that. Since hiring Aaron, I was able to take my weekends off, even reduce my workload during the week. I went from working 60, 70 hours a week to almost a normal workload. So, I’ve been a member of the Builder 20 team. in the National Association of Home Builders for 25 years, 20 years. And during that time, I’ve seen a lot of sales managers with the other companies that have been involved.

(Speaker 3)
And in my opinion, Aaron is smarter and sharper than any sales manager of any builder that’s ever been in our group. Now, some markets They don’t have to try to sell, they just sell themselves. But with the ability to sell and to train and hire, Aaron was better than any of those sales managers that were in my program. Well, I remember when I considered hiring Aaron many years ago, the thought of spending the extra money was a little scary, but in hindsight, it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It freed my time, increased our sales, and at the end of the day, increased our profitability beyond my wildest expectations. Years ago, I was concerned that if I didn’t do whatever a customer asked me to do, it might be the last house I sold.

(Speaker 3)
And so over time, we were able to move away from unlimited customization to pre -designed options. The problem that we were having in those days is that the customer would tell us what they wanted, but they didn’t really know what they wanted. And we would deliver exactly what they told us to do, and they wouldn’t be happy with it. So as we became more standardized, we give lots of options, but we don’t customize. And in the end, that allows us to sell more homes for better margins than spending countless hours trying to customize

(Speaker 1)
in just every avenue of the sales process. We get weekly reports on sales, on profitability, on production, and it provides all the manageable tools that I need to review the company from a 10 ,000 foot level. And so if you go to Thrivetimeshow . com forward slash millionaire, you can download a book that I have written called A Millionaire’s Guide How to Become Sustainably Rich. You can download it for free at Thrivetimeshow . com forward slash millionaire.

(Speaker 1)
But you have to actually implement that which is in the book. And so on today’s show, we’re joined by a very successful person in the home building business, a great friend of mine, a man by the name of Aaron Antus. Aaron Antus, welcome on to Thrivetimeshow. How are you, sir? I’m doing great, Clay. Thanks for having me on.

(Speaker 12)
Hey, so I got to ask you this for people out there that want to prove you’re not a hologram. First off, what’s the website for your company so people can verify that you are, in fact, a real business?

(Speaker 1)
You bet. It’s shaholmes .

(Speaker 43)
com.

(Speaker 1)
S -H -A -W -H -O -M -E -S .

(Speaker 15)
com.

(Speaker 1)
shaholmes . com. I’m pulling it up. shaholmes . com. Pulling it up.

(Speaker 1)
That’s the website, shaholmes . com. And when you and I met, before we met, you had been already very successful as a home builder. You turned your dream of being a home builder guy into reality. Yeah. And so how many homes had you sold, or what kind of sales had you done?

(Speaker 1)
and your career as a home builder guy before you and I even met? Before we met, probably about $750 million in sales prior to meeting you. And then you did, the year we first started working together, what were the sales totals that year?

(Speaker 40)
We were at like $19 million.

(Speaker 1)
$19 million. obviously we’re in 2023, and so we’ll see how this year ends. But as far as ending 2022, how much sales did you do last year at the end of 2022? 2022, we were at like $84 million. OK, so from $19 million to? $84 million.

(Speaker 1)
$84 million. So you’re doing some things right here. And what we’re going to try to do is kind of demystify the plan here. OK, so here we go. You were establishing revenue goals. Yep.

(Speaker 1)
Um, when you and I first started working together, we started off with a 13 point assessment. We, we went over, um, your goals. I’m not going to ask you to share your goals on the air, but why is it important that you have goals? Well, I mean, goals are sort of your guideposts that, you know, you set something out there in front of you and you start chasing after it. And without that, you’re just kind of floundering in mediocrity. You don’t have any reason to get up in the morning and really get after it.

(Speaker 1)
And so, you know, I think goals are, you know, it’s, it’s, you can have lots of different types of goals. And we’ve talked about a lot of this. We’ve talked about, you know, having financial goals and having, you know, fitness goals and having friendship goals and just all these different areas. I know you’ve got the F6, you know. So that’s kind of something that, you know, we touched on very early on. You asked me like, is the goal, is one of your goals more income or is it more time?

(Speaker 1)
And so I said, well, really, at this point, it’s more income. And then later, it became more time. So it’s changed over the time I’ve known you since 2016. We’re going on seven years. And the income went up considerably. So now it’s turned in the last couple of years towards more time.

(Speaker 1)
Now, the break -even numbers, again, I’m not asking you for the numbers on the show, but you guys have a lot of fixed costs. I mean, if you go to shawhomes . com, you’ve got framers. You have plumbers. You have tile people. You have so many skilled people.

(Speaker 1)
You have a full -time salesperson. team, you have an admin staff and if you don’t sell… house, you still have the service of the land. You still have all the overhead. Why is it important for every listener out there to know their break -even point? How many deals they need per month just to break even?

(Speaker 1)
Well, yeah, because you’re going backwards real quick. And it doesn’t take very long if you’re at the beginning of your business. It doesn’t take very long for you to be in a place where you know, the creditors are knocking at your door and you can’t pay your bills and all of a sudden you’re going to lose all your, for us, all of our trades, all of our suppliers are going to start backing out. So, you know, you’ve got to know what that number is that lets you tread water so that, you know, okay, this is the worst case scenario, everything above that, at least I’m into the profit zone. So, you know, you go out of business pretty quick. Most businesses don’t last more than just a few months if they get below that breakeven number.

(Speaker 1)
Now, folks, again, these might seem like simple steps, but they’re all the linear steps you have to take to create time, freedom, and financial freedom. And if you want to grow your company, this is how you do it. Box number three, though, is you have to know the hours you’re willing to work. Now, your incredible wife is here off camera. It’s for accountability. So at any point, she could yell, like, amen or boo.

(Speaker 1)
But you guys are on the same page with the hours you’re willing to work. And you guys, as a couple, I want to brag on both of you. You guys both committed to sacrificing time and energy and a lot of things to get get to where you’re at in life. And then as you had your children, you raised them, you decided to devote time to raising said kids. And now that your kids are older, you’re devoting time to raising these kids. So it’s not like you abdicated being a parent while also growing a company.

(Speaker 40)
You did both well.

(Speaker 1)
Let me get your thoughts on sitting down with your spouse, if you’re watching this today, or your significant other, and making sure you’re on the same page about how many hours per week you’re willing to work. Well, yeah, I mean, you don’t want to grow a business to make a whole bunch of money just so you can split it in half later. Oh. Because that’s kind of what happens when you don’t work out those details ahead of time. And so my wife and I have been married 25 years. We’ve been together for four before that.

(Speaker 12)
And so, yeah, 20, sorry, 26.

(Speaker 1)
Did I just say 25? 26. Real quick, I hate to do this to you. I just got in trouble. Your wife just turned 27 on Thursday, and what you said is 100 % false. OK, so the unique value proposition here.

(Speaker 1)
Now, let’s talk about this. grow in a home building company, or a dog training business, or a haircut chain, or a carpet cleaning franchise, or whatever business we’re involved in helping to grow, you have to sit down as a listener out there, as a business owner, and you’ve got to figure out what makes your company unique. Absolutely. So I want to ask you, what makes Shaw Homes unique in the marketplace with other home builders? Yeah, we have more furnished and decorated model homes than any other builder in the market. So a lot of times people, when they walk into a home and they’re trying to decide if they like the floor plan, the layout, whatever, They usually, most builders in our market, have an empty house that they walk into.

(Speaker 1)
It just kind of echoes when you walk through it.

(Speaker 12)
There’s no furniture or anything.

(Speaker 1)
And we completely, as you can see in this little video here, we completely furnish and decorate it, make it beautiful. We are the most award -winning builder in the state of Oklahoma. That’s true. We’ve won like five times as many awards as any other builder in the market. Definitely, that is one of our big takeaways. And I’m going to throw you under the bus real quick, and I don’t mean to do this super passively aggressively.

(Speaker 1)
It’ll just be more of a subtle passive aggressive. When I met you, you guys had all these awards, but no one knew. That’s true. It was like this weird, bizarre thing where you had all these awards. I remember talking to you, and I’m like, what makes you guys different? And you’re like, you know, we do a good job.

(Speaker 1)
And you’re being nice about it.

(Speaker 42)
You’re a good salesperson.

(Speaker 1)
But I said, well, I mean, tell me about the awards. And you’re like, well, we got this award. That award this is true this award like 45 minutes later. It’s like that award this award. I need to shave now this award that award I need to go brush my teeth, this award, that award, I want to go mow the lawn now, this award, that award, I think I’m retiring, this award, my kids are turning 18, I can see it, this award, you’re just going, and this award, and that award.

(Speaker 1)
And so we put those on the website and that helped. And the other thing you guys were, we needed to change was all these people were saying great things, but we didn’t have video reviews of them saying it on camera. Right.

(Speaker 30)
So it was like your online reputation Didn’t match your real world reputation.

(Speaker 1)
It’s so much good momentum there. And so many people loved you guys. And now you guys have, would you say a hundred video reviews? Oh gosh, I would say more than that. We’ve got, yeah, we have a lot. You can just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

(Speaker 1)
And this is actually all that’s on this page. If you go to our YouTube channel, we have way more than this. So, yeah. So again, and this is all the stuff you’re going to grow a successful company, folks. Step one, you got to figure out your revenue goals. Step two, you got to figure out your breakeven goals.

(Speaker 1)
Step three, sit down for an hour of power. Sit down with your spouse. Make sure that you guys are on the same page of your hours you’re willing to work. Step four, unique value proposition. Figure out what it is that makes you unique. in -depth guide that you can download for free at thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 12)
com forward slash millionaire if you get stuck.

(Speaker 1)
Next box, you gotta improve your branding, your website, your one sheet, in your case, model home presentations, business cards, social media branding, everything that a customer sees needs to be first class. And I was talking to a guy named Ronnie Morales today and it’s Morales Brothers. I think you met him at a conference. He told me this and I’m not slamming Ronnie. Ronnie, if you’re listening, I’m not slamming you. This is the real thing.

(Speaker 1)
Ronnie said he listened to our show for seven consecutive years before ever reaching out. And now he’s reached out and he’s up 57 % in about eight months. That’s awesome.

(Speaker 41)
And we’re going to put his story on part two of today’s show because he’s in Texas and he’s seven years behind you.

(Speaker 1)
Yeah. But he’s doing a great job. What do you think that thing is where people have branding, and they are not aware of it? Someone hasn’t brought it to our attention? What causes bad branding?

(Speaker 1)
You know, the number one thing I hear business owners say is, well, you know, I don’t really need good branding because I sell everything by word of mouth. Oh, yeah, baby. Like, I’ve got such an incredible reputation that everybody just comes to me by word of mouth. Yeah. And then it’s like, okay, yeah, but how much business did you do last year? Well, not very much.

(Speaker 1)
And I’m really unprofitable, but I’ve got great reputation out there and I get a lot of word of mouth. So when people switch over to starting to improve branding, I know you helped us a lot with that in just creating a lot better looking website, creating a, you know, we’ve got an office environment now that is when people walk into our model home, they are blown away. We truly wow our customers when they come to our model homes. It’s a one of a kind experience in the state of Oklahoma. And the process of that, you know, just going through branding it so that it looks really top notch. And, you know, that includes everything from, you know, marketing to all of your senses and everything else.

(Speaker 1)
So it just really brought us to another level. And when the customer comes in and experiences us after having walked through other builders homes, they usually come in and go, you guys are just on a whole nother level. It’s sights, sounds, smells, experiences, everything that your customer sees, they’re grading you on. And you might not know that they are even judging you because they’re not filling out the form. And I have a funny story to share with you that’s kind of sad. I was working with a fitness guy years ago, and I’m not going to tell you what study he’s in or what study he focused on.

(Speaker 1)
I know you want to know, but I’m not going to tell you. And he filled out the form because his wife wanted him to schedule a 13 -point assessment. He did not want to. And he tells me, Clay, honestly, I’m just doing the call because my wife wants me on the phone. And I got to tell you, I really don’t get leads from social media.

(Speaker 12)
I don’t get leads from marketing.

(Speaker 1)
I get all my leads word of mouth, like you were saying. And I said, well, let me just do this. Let’s just, this first month working together, let me get all the passwords for your Facebook, your Google, your YouTube. And I’m just, as the first month, we just, with every single client, we optimize your YouTube, your Facebook, your Instagram, your Twitter, all that. We log on, this is a fitness guy. He was spending like $400 a week every week on ads.

(Speaker 39)
And he hadn’t known, he wasn’t aware, that every time a lead came in, it got stuck in Facebook and went to an email address that he wasn’t checking.

(Speaker 1)
So think about this. And it’s like 15 to 20 leads a week for years, this guy had.

(Speaker 12)
That’s not good.

(Speaker 1)
And so I’m going, you’re spending $20 ,000 a year on ads that you’re not checking.

(Speaker 40)
Getting anything from.

(Speaker 1)
And are you aware that the phone number on your site rings to a phone that’s no longer a real phone? And I’m serious, this was real. And then he had before and after photos where somebody had had the idea of let’s get before and after photos. You know where you interview someone before they start working out? Yeah. But then they never completed the thought.

(Speaker 1)
You know what I’m saying? I do. Where it’s like they interview him about getting in shape, but then they never actually like aired the part where they’re in shape. Oh, no. So it’s just sort of like an interview with people that are not in shape. And again, he’s a busy guy, busy entrepreneur.

(Speaker 1)
That kind of stuff is very common. It’s kind of laughable if it’s not your company. But OK, next box. You’ve got to determine your customer acquisition costs. How much does it cost you to get a customer? So Aaron, you guys run ads on Google, on Facebook, on retargeting ads.

(Speaker 1)
You have massive signage. There’s a lot of stuff you do. Why is it important to know how much it costs you at the end of the day to get an actual new buyer of a shawl? Well, because if you want more of those, you know what it costs to go generate more of those. And it’s, you know, it’s a cost where it’s like, okay, well, you know, I’m down in sales this month or this quarter or whatever, and I need four more sales to make it a good quarter here before the end of the quarter. And it’s like, I know I can go put money into that and it’s going to cost me X number of dollars per customer to get there.

(Speaker 1)
And so then it’s just a matter of, do I want to spend that money to get to that point? So for us, it’s a pretty high number because it’s a big ticket item. But for some people, it might be very small to get that each customer. But for us, You got to know what the number is, because ultimately, that goes into the price of your product and whatever you sell. We’re doing homes. That is one of our line item costs in our homes.

(Speaker 1)
That’s a cost. Yeah. Now, if you go to any of the businesses that I’m involved in, you go to eitrlounge . com forward slash staff. I put in the password here. Once I put in the password, I have all of the documents needed to run the company.

(Speaker 13)
And they’re all saved.

(Speaker 1)
So the checklist for the manager, the opening checklist for the assistant manager, the bathroom cleaning checklist, everything needed to grow the companies all in one place.

(Speaker 32)
And therefore, the business, everybody who works there knows where to go to find those documents.

(Speaker 1)
This is the kind of stuff that fires me up, and it makes other people crazy. Oh, yeah. So with the conferences we do, if we ever do a conference that’s out of town, I have a checklist of stuff I print out. I know it seems kind of crazy for people, but this is real. I print it out, and it’s like, OK, socks. I’m gone for four days.

(Speaker 1)
I want to have 12 pairs of socks. Why? Because it could be hot. I don’t know. Could get wet. I don’t know.

(Speaker 1)
I have a list of deodorant and socks and shaving. And I have a laptop and a backup laptop. And I have patch cables and XLR cables. And we bring three. You’ve seen all this stuff. But it’s multiple monitors, backup monitors.

(Speaker 1)
It’s backups for everything. When you guys build a Shaw home, you’re not moving off of guesswork. There’s blueprints. There’s plans. There’s systems. So houses don’t fall down.

(Speaker 1)
There’s somebody out here listening right now. that doesn’t have systems in place. They don’t have checklists. They don’t have it. And so they have to think about everything all the time, because if not, they forget a step. What would you say is the importance of having taken the time to have built these systems now?

(Speaker 1)
It is the night and day difference between running around like your hair is on fire every day, constantly playing firefighter, or you hear people say, I’m up to my armpits in alligators. It’s because you don’t have systems and processes. And every time at Shaw Homes, every time that we have a problem come up, we automatically go, okay, what step in our system did this fall apart in? And what’s broken in that step? And how can we fix it? So it never happens again.

(Speaker 1)
So we go fix the process. We address the problem for the customer, but then we go back after that and we go, how do we fix the process so we don’t repeat this problem? And the business owners that are running around with their hair on fire all the time, it’s because there’s no systems, no processes. Everything is urgent. Everything is hair on fire. Correct.

(Speaker 1)
chaos world that you live in. And if you’re going to build homes for a living and build a lot of them, you cannot live in that chaos world. Now, this next box, I get excited about all these boxes. This is what I get excited about. This right here is what I care about.

(Speaker 39)
OK, the next box is management and execution.

(Speaker 1)
You have people on your team, and I’m just going to give some examples. And I hope this benefits somebody out there listening. You have people on your team. It’s their responsibility. Every time that you do a new house, they go out there and they design or they get the blueprint on the website. They get the new design of the home because people want to see floor plans.

(Speaker 1)
So somebody’s job is to get those up there. Somebody gets photos of every house that you guys are building. Somebody gets videos of every house. Somebody puts them all up for sale. Somebody answers the phone every day. Somebody calls the leads every day.

(Speaker 1)
Every day. Somebody cleans the bathroom every day. Somebody builds the houses every day. Now, this is what I find, and I’m sure none of our listeners can relate to this. Some of our listeners fire people, and then nothing happens. So work with me on this.

(Speaker 1)
There’s listeners out there that I talk to every day because we do free 13 -point assessments. So I talk to two or three people a day who go to thrivetimeshow . com. They want to schedule a consultation. And the other day, you heard me talking to Jordan. I said, Jordan, go ahead and keep setting those.

(Speaker 1)
He set an appointment with someone who’s definitely not a good fit. And you could tell he had a little question if that was OK. And I said, I would rather you set an appointment with somebody than not. Because I don’t know if who’s a good fit or not. But the idea, though, is I sit down. I was talking to a guy the other day, and he was like, the reason why my team did not get Google reviews or videos reviews this week is because we fired a guy.

(Speaker 1)
And I go, because I’m just asking him, where are we stuck? What’s your biggest limiting factor? I have a big process I go through in my evaluation. I said, who calls the leads? He’s like, well, normally I have a person that calls the leads, but we just fired her. And I mean this, I’m going, how long have you been in business?

(Speaker 1)
This guy’s been in business for over 10 years and he’s reaching out for help. Good person. We’re trying to help him. I think it’s going to be a good fit.

(Speaker 38)
But so I said, so basically everybody follows the systems until they don’t work there anymore.

(Speaker 1)
And then no one does the systems. And you go back and forth vacillating from things being done to not being done. And one of my favorite things about working with you guys is that you’re honest people. What does that mean? You do your best to do what you say you’re going to do. And you hold yourself and the employees accountable.

(Speaker 1)
Absolutely. But what would happen if every week you, if somebody wasn’t performing, you remove them from the position, and then the houses weren’t built for the week because something wasn’t going well? Or because maybe a salesperson wasn’t performing at the peak, you let them go, and the next thing you know, what would happen if you managed your company that way? It would be a disaster. I mean, I can’t just forget about it. superintendent without having somebody already ready to take over All of those responsibilities because i’ve got materials showing up at the job site today tomorrow and the next day i’ve got Trades showing up who needs some supervision need to know what they’re supposed to be doing if I fire that guy with no warning, somebody else has to come fill in that position.

(Speaker 1)
So for us, we try to never have that gap happen. And sometimes it’s like you know that you’re going to need to fire somebody, and you can see the writing on the wall. Right. But you want to get the next person up and ready to go before that happens. And you guys have a weekly meeting. So we talk a lot on this show from an employer perspective.

(Speaker 1)
But how frustrating would it be to be an A -player employee, and you’re working for a C -player boss? You know, a boss that doesn’t have a staff meeting, that’s not organized, that doesn’t pay people on time, that’s constantly emotional. I see that a lot. And so management is a learned skill. And thankfully, you know, when I first met with you, you’d already really mastered, in my opinion, managing people. But this next box is where I thought we needed some help, was to build a system for constantly recruiting new people, because certain people work for Shaw Homes for three years or four years, and then they want to go move, they want to have a baby, they want to stay home, they want to get a new job.

(Speaker 1)
And even though you have low turnover at Shaw, certain people get to their expiration date, and it’s time for them to move on to something else. And because we didn’t have a process in place at Shaw at that time to consistently bring in a pipeline of new people, it made it difficult to do the management that was needed. Can you talk about the importance of implementing a human resources program for hiring, inspiring, training, and retaining good people? It’s huge. I mean, that was definitely an Achilles heel for us. And you helped us a lot with that.

(Speaker 1)
You know, putting in a, you know, where every single week I’m seeing, you know, potential candidates that could come work for us. and they’re job shadowing and seeing what it’s like to work in our company every single week. It does multiple things. It helps the people who work there to know, hey, there’s other people who desire to come work here. And if I’m not doing my job, I might get replaced. So there’s a little bit of that.

(Speaker 1)
And then it’s also a thing of, you know, the people who are shadowing get to see the job being done by people who are happy doing their job. And it helps them to want to come be a part of Shaw Homes. I’ve got a very long list of people right now in every single position. that would be excited to come work for us if I did all of a sudden find myself with an opening, you know, because occasionally people leave with no notice or whatever, you know, something happens, family emergency, whatever. Right. And you have that, oh, I need to replace somebody immediately.

(Speaker 1)
And the great thing about it is I have a whole bunch of people that I could plug into that position very quickly because every single week I am interviewing. Now, the next box here is you got to do your accounting. And in order to earn millions, you have to automate your accounting. What does that mean? You have to have a system in place for making sure you price your products and services correctly, and that you pay yourself first, that you set aside a set amount of money to pay yourself and your staff. And all these things work together.

(Speaker 1)
And what I find is people ask me, often just not knowing. They come from a place of a good heart. They don’t know. They say to me, Clay, what is the most important step in growing shaw homes. I’ve heard Aaron on the show. He’s a great guy.

(Speaker 1)
Clay, I’ve heard PMHOKC on the show. Clay, I’ve seen Oxyfresh on the show. What was the most important thing they did? And to me, that’s like asking a hiker, what was the most important step you took to get to the top of that mountain? Well, it was the one we took there an hour ago. I took a left step.

(Speaker 1)
So it’s like asking a baker, what’s the most important ingredient? Is it milk? Is it sugar? Is it eggs? You know, it’s like asking a farmer, what’s the most important thing, feeding the animals or watering them?

(Speaker 1)
What’s the key to your success? There’s just certain questions that I understand people want to know, but all of this has to work together, and nothing works unless you do. So I have three final questions for you. For anybody out there that’s thinking about scheduling a consultation, a free consultation with thrivetimeshow . com and myself, obviously they’re stuck with me if they fill out the form. I’m the only person that does 13 -point assessments.

(Speaker 1)
I believe we, I’ve seen it since 2005, we help people decrease their costs, increase their time, freedom, and profits. What would you say is the benefit of scheduling that 13 -point assessment? Well, actually, the 13 -point assessment was very eye -opening for me. You asked me a lot of tough questions that I probably should have been asking myself and wasn’t. And so as we went through the questions, I was like, I think at every question you asked me, I was like, oh, that’s a good question. And I was like, hang on.

(Speaker 1)
Let me think about that for a minute. So I find that it kind of helps open your eyes to, you know, Hmm, these are some things that I know I have some areas of weakness. And then there were, I think, a couple of the questions where I was like, oh, I know the answer to this one. I got this one. No problem. But it helps you sort of identify.

(Speaker 1)
I walked away having identified areas of strength and areas of weakness, even though that really wasn’t the purpose of the phone call, necessarily. It helped me to see that. And then I was like, hmm, I think I have a need in a couple of these areas. And I didn’t really know what to do. For myself, I didn’t have the answers. You know, in part three of today’s show, part two, we’re going to show the Ronnie Morales story.

(Speaker 1)
On part three, we’re going to do a testimony with Myron. And Myron just bought his first Lamborghini today, and he’s super fired up. And so Myron’s about six years down the path. We’ve been working with you for about eight years, whereas Ronnie’s been with us for less than a year. And it’s at a certain point that we have to take action. Knowledge without application is meaningless.

(Speaker 1)
What would you say to somebody who’s like, you know, it’s $1 ,700. month. And, you know, I’m spending that much right now on random ads and that much money on, uh, random regrettable purchases at the gas station. And, you know, a lot of iTunes I’m downloading, I’m spending $1 ,700 a month on various things. And I don’t know if I can afford it because I’ve just bought another vehicle that I can’t afford, but I’m leasing it. You know, what would you say to anybody who’s kind of on that fence?

(Speaker 1)
I mean, I would say you need to do it. I mean, it has been a game changer for us. I don’t know why you would sit there and think $1 ,700 a month is too much money to spend. Go find the money somewhere. Go empty out your sofa cushions. Go sell the stuff that you have in your house that you’re not using.

(Speaker 1)
I mean, go get whatever you need to do to get to that place. You need to find that $1 ,700. And I will say this. That cost was very quickly replaced with the extra money we were making. And I’ve seen, I’ve actually seen, because I’ve been around you for a long time, I’ve seen a lot of your clients come in and right off the bat, they’re real nervous about, am I going to be able to, you know, because maybe they’re a smaller company or whatever.

(Speaker 24)
And they’re like, I’m wondering if I’m going to be able to handle this $1 ,700 a month.

(Speaker 1)
And then I see them six months later, and I’m like, how’s it going now?

(Speaker 31)
And they’re like, I don’t know.

(Speaker 1)
Man, we’re just hitting record after record. I have referred several business owners to you. And they’re doing great. That are killing it. And that, you know, I’ll give one example. I won’t name the person.

(Speaker 1)
But I did send one of my very good friends to you who was on the verge of losing his business because he just wasn’t able. He had bought another one of the shops of what he does. He opened it, and it was not profitable. And it was going to take under both of his shops. And I sent him over to you. And I remember about three months later, I asked him, how’s it going?

(Speaker 1)
And he goes, man, we just had a record -breaking month. This was amazing. And by the way, he said, first, he just hit another record -breaking month, just so you know. Yeah. And I know right now, not only does he have way more income, but he has a lot more time. freedom, because he’s been working with you for many years now.

(Speaker 1)
And so it changed his life, just like it changed my life. I would say, if you’re thinking about doing a 13 -point assessment, stop thinking. Dial the phones. Pause this video. Make the phone call. Reach out to Clay.

(Speaker 1)
Get it started right now. Now, final question I have is, I think people look at oxyfresh . com, and they go in. There’s 500 locations now. And they look at Elephant in the Room and they go, there’s five brick and mortar locations now. They look at Shaw Homes and they go, you know, these are big success stories.

(Speaker 1)
I don’t know that I can do it. What would you say to somebody out there that just feel like they might not have the, like all this stuff they’re going to learn is going to be over their head, too complicated. What would you say? I would say the information, the ideas are easy. It’s the application that is difficult for people. The ideas that you share, there’s nothing that’s like, oh my God, I don’t have a PhD, therefore I can’t do it.

(Speaker 1)
I feel like it’s all very, very simple stuff. But it is a lot of action to get traction. And you’ve got to get the action going. And I think if somebody has diligence and discipline or can learn diligence or discipline, they’re going to do extremely well.

(Speaker 38)
And it’s not about education.

(Speaker 1)
It’s about action.

(Speaker 37)
Now, Aaron, I got one thing I want to say, and then we’re going to wrap up today’s show with a boom.

(Speaker 1)
Because booms stand for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum.

(Speaker 8)
And that’s what’s required to have success.

(Speaker 1)
Um, you know, people watching this, they’re going, well, Aaron, you know, he looks like a normal guy.

(Speaker 12)
Well, that’s true.

(Speaker 1)
Oh, they say, well, he sounds like a normal guy. Sounds like an all right guy. You know, that’s true. But the one thing you can’t quite picture on the show, and I want to just give that gift to you folks who are watching is Aaron smells tremendous. It’s like a, it’s a, it’s like a, if you had smell -o -vision, if you could just get up there and just. smell that it’s incredible and it’s really it’s it’s his aroma that allows him to achieve massive success so unless so if you’re out there and you’re going what’s the secret sauce it’s not a sauce it’s more of just a smell so uh i don’t know if you qualify to have the kind of

(Speaker 36)
he has, unless you smell like he smells.

(Speaker 1)
It’s a really tremendous smell. Okay. Let’s do this thing with the boom. Here we go. 3, 2, 1. Boom.

(Speaker 34)
Well, Thrive Nation, we have an opportunity all the time.

(Speaker 35)
Okay.

(Speaker 1)
Aaron Antis, 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. Yes, we have Mel Kaye in the house.

(Speaker 1)
Pastor Phil and Tammy Hotzenpiller will be hosting this event at their beautiful church right there in sunny Anaheim, California. Yes, folks, make this a December to remember. This branch. Make this a December to remember and join us at the two -day interactive Business Growth Workshops. 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.

(Speaker 22)
How do you get tickets?

(Speaker 1)
Go to Thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 28)
com.

(Speaker 29)
Again, how do you get tickets?

(Speaker 34)
Go to Thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 33)
com.

(Speaker 1)
I’m Ron Burgundy. He needed someone to run the companies for him. And so the man that runs the Trump organization, poor 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.

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

(Speaker 1)
That’s going to be amazing. 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?

(Speaker 12)
Forget it, he’s rolling. And A over now! and it’s $500 for a VIP ticket now we only have limited seating here with 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 thrive timeshow .

(Speaker 6)
com go to thrive timeshow .

(Speaker 1)
com when you go to thrive timeshow . 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. Just Just text my number. It’s my cell phone number. My personal cell phone number.

(Speaker 14)
We’ll keep that.

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

(Speaker 1)
I know we have a lot of Spanish speaking people that attend these conferences. And so to be bilingually sensitive, my cell phone number is 918 -851 -0102. That is not actually bilingual. That’s just saying Juan for a Juan. It’s not the same thing. I think you’re attacking me.

(Speaker 1)
Now, let’s talk about this. Now, what kind of stuff will you learn at the Thrive Time Show Workshop? So Aaron, you’ve been to many of these over the past seven, eight years. So let’s talk about it. I’ll tee up the thing and then you tell me what you’re going to learn here, okay? Okay.

(Speaker 1)
You’re going to learn marketing, marketing and branding. What are we going to learn about marketing and branding? Oh, yeah. We’re going to dive into, you know, so many people say, oh, you know, I got to get my brand known out there like the Trump brand, right? You want to get that brand out there. It’s like, how do I actually make people know what my business is?

(Speaker 1)
and make it a household name. You’re going to learn some intricacies of how you can do that. You’re going to learn sales. So many people struggle to sell something. This just in, your business will go to hell if you can’t sell, so we’re going to teach you sales. We’re going to teach you search engine optimization, how to come up top in the search engine results.

(Speaker 1)
We’re going to teach you how to manage people. Aaron, you have managed, no exaggeration, hundreds of people throughout your career and thousands of contractors, and most people struggle with managing people. Why does everybody have to learn how to manage people? Well, because first of all, people are, you either have great people or you have people who suck. So it could be a challenge, you know, learning how to work with a large group of people and get everybody pulling in the same direction can be a challenge. But if you don’t,

(Speaker 1)
If you have 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.

(Speaker 32)
We’re going to teach you accounting.

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

(Speaker 1)
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. Now let me tell you how the format is set up here to get books. This is a two -day interactive 15 Think about this, folks. It’s two days. Each day, it starts at 7 a .

(Speaker 1)
m. , and it goes until 5 p . m. So from 7 a . m. to 5 p .

(Speaker 1)
m.

(Speaker 28)
, two days.

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

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

(Speaker 31)
And what we do is we we allow you as the attendee to write your questions on the whiteboard.

(Speaker 1)
as you mentioned, we answer every single question on the whiteboard, 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 30)
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 26)
That’s a good idea.

(Speaker 1)
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 29)
And when Inc.

(Speaker 28)
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.

(Speaker 14)
But yet the average client that you and I work with We can typically double this.

(Speaker 1)
I’m just no, no, no hyperbole, no exaggeration. I have thousands of testimonials to back this up. We have thousands of testimonials to back it up.

(Speaker 27)
But when you work with a home builder, when I work with a business owner, we can typically double the size of the company within 24 months.

(Speaker 26)
Yeah.

(Speaker 1)
Double. And you say double. Yeah. There’s businesses that we have tripled. There’s businesses we’ve grown eight X. There’s so many examples you can see at thrive timeshow . com.

(Speaker 1)
But again, this is the most interactive best business workshop on the planet. This is objectively the highest and most reviewed business workshop on the planet. Add to that Eric Trump, the man that runs the Trump Organization. You say, Clay, I still I’m not going to get a ticket unless you give me more. OK, fine. We’re going to serve you the same meal both days.

(Speaker 1)
True story. We have we cater in the food. And because I keep it simple, I literally bring in the same food both days for lunch. Who’s with me? Let’s go. Come on.

(Speaker 1)
was an incredible Mexican restaurant.

(Speaker 25)
That’s going to happen.

(Speaker 12)
It says, I want more.

(Speaker 24)
This is not enough.

(Speaker 1)
Give me more.

(Speaker 23)
OK. I’m not going to mention their names right now because I’m working on it behind the scenes here.

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

(Speaker 12)
com.

(Speaker 22)
Go there right now.

(Speaker 21)
Thrivetimeshow .

(Speaker 1)
com. Request a ticket for the two -day interactive event. Again, the event’s going to be on December 4th and 5th in sunny Anaheim, California. Great weather.

(Speaker 20)
Make this a December to remember.

(Speaker 11)
Eric Trump, the man who leads the Trump Organization.

(Speaker 20)
It’s going to be a blasty blast. There’s no upsells.

(Speaker 11)
Aaron, I could not be more excited about this event. I think it is incredible. And there’s somebody out there right now, you’re watching and you’re like, but I already signed up for this incredible other program called Smoke Your Way to Thin.

(Speaker 10)
I think that’s going to change your life. I promise you this will be 10 times better than that. It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.

(Speaker 6)
Don’t do the smoke your way to thin conference.

(Speaker 9)
That is I’ve tried it.

(Speaker 18)
Don’t do it.

(Speaker 6)
Yeah. Chain smoking is not a viable. I mean, it is life changing. It is life changing. If you become a chain smoker, it is life changing. Best weight loss program.

(Speaker 9)
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.

(Speaker 6)
Again, that’s Aaron Antis. I’m Clay Clark and reminding you and inviting you to come out up to the two day interactive. Thrive Time Show workshop in beautiful Anaheim, California.

(Speaker 19)
I’m Vince Suzuki, also from Sarasota, Florida.

(Speaker 6)
He dragged me here.

(Speaker 4)
Yup.

(Speaker 18)
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.

(Speaker 2)
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 what to do next. Already, there’s the strategic, step -by -step, real -life implementation that we can do to our business, and I’m super excited to be here. I’m very excited that Eric Hump is here, and that is going to be epic. My name is Erica, and it has been amazing here at the conference. I’m learning so much. Everything is perfect for me.

(Speaker 2)
Clay Clark, man, he is one character. That’s a good word for him, character. Yeah, that is it. driven, smart, and I’ve never met a guy who was so hyper all the time. He’s doing so much good.

(Speaker 17)
And then I met his mother and she just says, she just lets him be Clay Clark.

(Speaker 16)
I mean, so he’s endorsed by his mother and he’s doing magnificent work.

(Speaker 2)
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.

(Speaker 5)
Oh, it’s incredible. Yeah. He’s, he’s like, he’s, he’s a machine. He’s a machine. But his, you know, I could I have problems with my company starting at 9 o ‘clock. Yes.

(Speaker 5)
Hundreds of people showing up at 5 a . m. in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Man, Man, he’s a leader of a leader.

(Speaker 6)
He’s a fantastic young man. No, he is. And the greatest thing that’ll come out of all of it, aside from winning the presidency of the United States, we’ll get to that in a second. 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 1)
I love you and to General Flynn. Thank you. You guys are incredible You guys are incredible warriors. You guys are incredible incredible warrior. So thank you my friend plate Clark is here somewhere Where’s my buddy play plays the greatest? I met his goats today.

(Speaker 2)
I met his dogs. 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?

(Speaker 2)
His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing. 4 ,000 % from February to February. Now I can better that. 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.

(Speaker 2)
In the last two and a half days, We have bettered our entire month of February and the last two and a half days. 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.

(Speaker 2)
Actually I learned at the Academy at Kings Point in New York. Octa non verba. Watch what a person does. not what they say. you know that wasn’t cool 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 gonna 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 Fight to Save Our Nation so you go to Amazon right now you buy a copy of the book 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.

(Speaker 1)
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. You have a chance to win a dinner at Mar -a -Lago with Eric Trump and myself, and there’s more.

(Speaker 15)
right there, just for your viewers.

(Speaker 1)
It’s the most exclusive private club in the world.

(Speaker 14)
$2 million to get into, just base membership fee.

(Speaker 1)
And I promise we’re going to make your night absolutely incredible. Clay 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. 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.

(Speaker 1)
New York Times is going to do everything they can to keep you from being number one bestseller. You know that. I know that. You know the games that they’re willing to play. But play goes. Why don’t we do a couple of things?

(Speaker 1)
First of all, I love having dinner with Clay. He’s the greatest. 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.

(Speaker 13)
Why don’t we bring a couple to dinner at Mar -a -Lago?”

(Speaker 1)
And I said, absolutely, consider it done. So I said, they have to text you, Clay.

(Speaker 2)
They can’t text me, because we’ll be getting 1 ,000 of these.

(Speaker 1)
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. I want to pull this up again one more time here, Jax, because 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?

(Speaker 1)
Yes. You buy a copy of the book, Pop Quiz. 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.

(Speaker 1)
Folks, that is my cell phone number. So we’ll keep that private between you and me and everybody. 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?

(Speaker 1)
Now, Eric, your birthday was hijacked. OK, so your birthday was hijacked. 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.

(Speaker 1)
No, no. So we’re going to run it until October 14th. October 14th. It has to be pre -sale. This just in. It has to be between October 14th.

(Speaker 1)
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 -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 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.

(Speaker 2)
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. 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, and you know, Cash Patel is a very good friend of mine, and was a very good friend of Charlie’s.

(Speaker 2)
You watch everybody that’s up on that stage every single day as they got to the bottom of exactly what happened, and they brought justice to what happened, or are trying to bring justice to what happened. And it’s kind of unthinkable. But you know St. Jude, and I talk a lot about St. Jude in this book, because fighting pediatric cancer has always been a cornerstone of my life. 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.

(Speaker 1)
It’s the not -so -tolerant left. And we can never let our voices be extinguished, Clay. You stood on that stage as well as anybody else. 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. You believed in a greater country.

(Speaker 1)
And you were on that stage every single day. You know I was on that stage with you every single day.

(Speaker 2)
And I was on the Turning Point stage with Charlie all the time. And I was on stages across the country in 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, Undersea. Just 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