How to Grow a Successful Gym + “Working w/ Clay Clark Has Been the Biggest Stress Relief Ever…We’ve Gone from 700 Members to Over 1,800.” – Luke Owens (TheHubGym.com) + Celebrating 4 Clay Clark Client Success Stories

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

Hey guys, this is Luke Owens with The Hub Gym. I’ve been working with Thrive now for maybe five months or so. Just wanted to give a quick review on what that experience has been for me. Within the first meeting or so after starting with Thrive, but after about five months now of working with them, I’ll tell you that it’s been the biggest stress relief I’ve I’ve ever had in regard to being in business and feeling like we’re actually headed in a direction that’s going to produce some pretty amazing results. Just from the accountability, the agenda, the weekly meetings, and me being held accountable helps me hold others accountable. So the experience overall has been amazing.

Appreciate it. Look forward to many more years of progress. Hey guys, my name is Luke Owens and I own The Hub Gym in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. And, you know, we started seeing those numbers increase and we also have seen our membership increase. So in about, I don’t know, two years or so, we’ve gone from about 700 members to now over 1 ,800. My name is Luke Owens, and I am the founder of the Hub Gym here in Broken Arrow.

My wife and I had a vision for the Hub Gym to be the center of health and fitness in the Broken Arrow area, just to be a place where a multitude of people could come and feel comfortable getting healthy.

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. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Timeshow.

Yes and yes.

Dr. Z, we have a five minute show that I think is going to blow the minds of the listeners.

Is that even possible? It is possible. Let’s find out.

I’m going to take the show down and then take the show back up. So we have Luke Owens on the show, who is the founder of the Hub Gym. And I went to graphic design college with this guy at Oklahoma State University. And you and I reconnected at a conference, I want to say three and a half years ago. And you’re a lighthearted guy, I’m lighthearted, but I’d like for you to share, what were you on the verge of doing before you came to the workshop?

Well, the morning that I learned about your conference, I walked into a local coffee shop, and I sat down to write my suicide letter to my wife and family.

Okay.

Wow.

There was a gentleman in the coffee shop that I knew, and he had just been to your last conference, and he said, hey man, I think there’s something that might help, and he knew me and the business, and that might help your business. and I just increasingly got more and more pissed as this guy’s talking to me because that’s not what I was there for. Sure.

But he spun the computer around and I saw your face and I thought, I know that guy and I’ve done some work with him and I’m not sure why that changed my mind or sort of put that on pause but it did and I’m grateful it did.

Wow. And the thing about it is I spoke at a conference years ago where somebody else called me years after and said, he was actually a banker guy, and he said, I was on the verge of suicide, and I saw you speak at the Community Bankers Association event in Vegas, and I literally was at the end. My bank was on that stress test, wasn’t doing well, and I had no idea how to market that thing. And the stuff I applied, it fixed it, but then the philosophy about the F6 life stuff you teach, at the time it was F5, we didn’t teach fun. This would be 2011 or 12 I was teaching this. And he said, it saved my life, and I want you to know that.

And I go, no, I mean, you’re saying that, but do you really mean that? And he said, no, seriously, was on the verge, because I couldn’t figure it out, and I didn’t know about the group interview, so I couldn’t find people. I didn’t know about how websites work, so I couldn’t get customers. I didn’t know why reviews were important.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know! Well, try being a graphic designer who went through school to teach you how to properly promote a business, and it’s still not working. I was in business at that time for 10 years, and I don’t know if you and Dr. Z remember that conference when I sort of like, grabbed you both and spun you around and said, I have to do this with you guys. I don’t advise people grabbing either clay or Z, but I did that.

That’s where I was a good spinning.

That was not a bad thing. I mean, this is general thumb, but I would like to do because I wanted Z to hear that too. Cause that’s why we do this is we, you know, I’ve met your wife, great lady met your father -in -law. Great person. Hey, please explain. what you have implemented, and I know you’ve got to go to do your rest of your life, but I have five areas I want to hit on in three minutes.

Let’s see if we can do it.

The group interview.

Yes.

Getting to the top of Google.

Yes.

Firing idiots.

Let’s go there.

Group interview.

How’s that helped your life? Well, I haven’t sold a membership, and I don’t remember when. I am no longer working as much in the day -to -day of the business. Instead, now I’m working on the business and we’re seeing growth. So we’re a hundred members away from our goal number that we’ve set together. And I also have time freedom, which was the first thing, you know, you guys asked the question, what is your financial goal?

I didn’t have one at the time. I just wanted to be happy and be alive and have time freedom to be with my family.

And I’ve achieved all of those things. You’re a graphic designer.

You went to school for graphic design, so you know how to design things.

Yes.

But they were unfindable because you were not anywhere near the top of Google.

Correct. And now you are.

So talk to me about adding content to your website, crappy content or good content, and getting reviews, because you’re now beating billion -dollar fitness companies in the search engine results when people type in broken arrow gyms. How has adding crappy, consistent content to your website and getting reviews changed your life? Well, it’s funny. This morning, I was looking for an old ad. And I came through this folder that was just every week, I was producing multiple different ads, multiple different offers, trying to get this thing to go. And when you started asking us to write content, I’m like, Man, I’m gonna have to make this really great or whatever.

It’s just a matter of building that content so that Google can find you.

And that’s happening.

And we’re now at the top.

Firing idiots.

Dr. Z talks about this a lot.

Unless you’re a life coach, Z, you shouldn’t.

Say two words, buh -bye.

Yeah. So Z talks about this, which might seem mean on the outset to fire people, but Z’s always told me, hey, listen, if somebody, people change.

Seldom. And if people need a life coach, then tell them they should go hire a life coach, but don’t be a life coach unless you are a life coach.

Right.

Talk to me about firing idiots. Well, I ran my business as a life coach, hiring people who needed help. Period. Because you’re an empath. Right. And also I wanted to feel good about how crappy I was being in my life.

So I would hire people who I felt like were in a worse off shape than me and felt like maybe I could help them.

But what I’ve learned is that you cannot get advice or take direction from people who do not have what you want.

Period. And so now I surround myself with people who have what I want in life. Period. And if that’s not you, you can go work at McDonald’s until you are, and then maybe come work with us. I don’t know. Wisdom is hiring people that are smarter and better at you than what they’re doing.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. Because fear keeps most people from doing that.

Fear of, are they gonna take the business? Are they gonna be, are they gonna, are they gonna, are they gonna, is everybody gonna like them more than me? I mean, all the things that fear comes over here, forget about that. The wisdom is to hire people that are smarter and better, more clever than you. Correct. And gather them up on your team.

It makes your team much, much stronger.

And if more people would do that, If they would have better better success rates now, I’ve worked with so many fitness companies so many in the I mean literally dozens And when I’ve worked with fitness companies, they always are told these these fitness conferences You should change your offer every week freshen it up every week.

There’s a new offer. There’s a click funnel.

There’s a new offer There’s a click funnel.

There’s a click funnel.

There’s a new offer.

There is a new so these marketing companies pitch it and because that makes the money, because there’s always something new to design. And it doesn’t work. There’s a new special. So keep them coming back.

For seven days, for seven days and $77, you too could lose seven pounds.

Offer ends Sunday. Right. So this goes on. I mean, seriously, there’s constant need to make sure all your pricing ends in a seven.

Sure.

And to do social media posts with you and celebrities. And it’s just you spend your whole day on Facebook engaging with the men and women. Talk to me about creating a no brainer and just sticking with that freaking thing for three years. You know, we have never changed our no brainer offer ever. Don’t we don’t turn it off. It’s been $1 for your first month since the beginning.

And it will not change. How is that possible? Going back to what Z just said about hiring people who kind of push you to be better or, you know, make you a bit uncomfortable.

You’ve met my manager, right?

Right.

The guy’s like Sheldon from Third Rock.

I could not stand this guy when I interviewed him because I saw so much.

He just was not like me at all. And so but now, Clay, he comes to our meetings and he has what I don’t have naturally. And he makes me uncomfortable all the time.

And that’s it.

business is growing.

Now you have grown from about 700 members when we first started tracking we didn’t know how many members.

Yeah we weren’t tracking.

So you’ve gone from around 700 members -ish to on the verge of 1900 members now. Correct. And three years almost tripled the guy’s business here great things are happening. Let’s talk about creating a purposeful schedule because you’ve met people you’ve met people you’ve met a guy even recently who said he doesn’t like me and I’ve never met this guy you’ve met a guy who said he doesn’t like me I’ve never met the guy right but he’s got an opinion to me he didn’t like me yeah I’ve met people that don’t like Z and it’s you they think you get down to a what and it’s because what they hate cuz they ain’t correct so here’s the deal Z has told me and other people I will not meet you for lunch I appreciate you, but I will not because I have other plans with my son or my daughter or with whatever I’m doing.

You’re now purposeful with your schedule, which means you’re saying no to grow.

Talk to us about that. I say no to anything that is not on my task list or does not involve my family, period.

No, wow, that sounds kind of now minded.

Well, actually I’m pursuing my master’s in psychology So one day I will be a counselor and I will say yes, if you decide to pay me to say yes, so There you go now Z They made the money’s we have time for you to ask Luke any question that you would like to ask because He is the fruits of our efforts. He’s why we do it. I mean this I only know of two people who are on the verge of suicide, but I met a guy at a church, I did not want to speak at a church, I do not like speaking, especially at churches, because I oftentimes curse, and so the show’s great, because I can edit it, you know what I mean? But in a church, you’re like, uh -oh. So a certain pastor asked me to speak, and the rules were, don’t curse. You can say earmuffs, earmuffs.

Okay, so I’m speaking, and there’s a guy in the audience who, I kept reminding him, him as the brown guy and I’m the white guy. Geez. No, wait a second.

No, this is good.

And he said, and Andrew can vouch for this.

He has said that that interaction at his church changed his life and he’s almost doubled the size of his company as a result of implementing this stuff.

But I went into this church and I was speaking and I just said, I referred to myself as the pale male and him as the brown guy.

We had a lot of fun right there.

And, but anyway, it’s like, I got his attention by messing with him a little bit, making fun of myself, changed his life.

You’re why Z and I do this.

We have a lot of fun doing this, but you’re why we do this.

Z, what question would you have for Luke or what feedback do you have for Luke?

Luke, how many men have looked at you with the seriousness in their eyes and a voice like this and said that they were your father?

Way too many.

Yeah, okay.

You gotta play a little Star Wars.

And we’re right across from each other.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was expecting a little Star Wars, like, you know, Luke, you are my son.

Sorry, I was kind of slow on the trigger today. You kind of missed that. You kind of missed that one. Sorry about that. Through editing, I can come back and catch it. So, Luke, you were in a desperate time in your life.

Absolutely. And you were getting ready to make decisions that you thought, at the time, were you’re only out. I was minutes away. Yep. Yep. And this occurrence happened.

And at what point and what happened specifically during the course of the next however many hours or days where you tore up that piece of paper, And your mindset shifted.

Is there anything that you can look at that, that one thing that happens is a series of events. I mean, that’s a pretty dramatic point to be at in someone’s life. And there’s someone listening right now that’s at that point, I’ll promise you.

And a horrible thing that’s going on in culture these days.

I mean, people out there, we all look at this Instagram and Facebook and think everybody’s having these perfect lives, and then they take their lives, because they’re not. And that’s the reality of really what’s going on.

This fake life that everybody posts on social media is not reality.

But that aside, We know there’s people out there right now at that juncture or close to that junction in their life. What turned it around for you specifically? And and and can you speak into someone who may be getting ready to go to a Starbucks and write that letter out? Yeah, so, I mean, I don’t know what exactly to say to a person that’s maybe going to do that now, other than reach out to somebody, because there are people there for you, even when it seems super dark. I’m not a religious person, but I’m very spiritual, and I truly chalk up that transition to a God thing. I truly do because it makes no other sense to me whatsoever that…

And I picked on you a lot at the conference because I felt that God thing. I told Vanessa, I don’t know what it is, but I kept doing it the whole conference. I think I called on you more than I’ve ever called on somebody at a conference. Did you remember that? I kept being like, Luke, Luke, you wore red shoes.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so I’m grateful.

I can say that. You know, I have three beautiful kids and an amazing wife. And I could not imagine having put them through something like that. So I am extremely grateful. Well, Luke, we’re grateful that you would have the courage to come on and share your story. A lot of people wouldn’t do that.

So on behalf of the Thrive Nation and the half million people listening, Thank you for being you, man. And we’re going to go interview somebody else with a story that’s less epic, but still great. But I appreciate you so much. Thanks, Luke. Good seeing you, buddy. Thank you, Z. And now, without any further ado, 3, 2, 1, boom!

You have questions?

America’s number one business coach has answers. It’s your broda from Minnesota. Here’s another edition of Ask Clay Anything on the Thrivetime Business Coach Radio Show. Welcome back to the conversation. It is the Thrivetime Show on your radio. And today we’re answering the question that so many people have.

How do I make my business grow? With Luke Owens with The Hub Gym. He’s a case study, meaning that he is a real, bona fide example that you can verify of a real entrepreneur who’s having real growth in his real business as a result of implementing the real system. So, Chubb, I’m going to walk you through real quick the steps you have to take to grow your business, and then I’m going to have Luke Owens share his hot and fresh take on how we did it, okay? Let’s do it. Step number one, Luke had to establish his revenue goals, right?

Step one. Step two, he had to establish the number of customers he needed to break even and to achieve his goals. Step three, he had to establish the number of hours that he was willing to work on his business to grow the business. Step number four, he had to determine his unique value proposition. What makes the gym different from other gyms? Step five, we had to improve the branding, right?

Step five, improve the branding. Step six, we had to create a three -legged marketing stool. Step number seven, we had to create a sales conversion system. Step number nine, we had to create repeatable systems, processes, and file organization, aka checklists, the whole deal. Step number 10, we had to learn how to manage people effectively.

Step number 11, we had to create a sustainable and repetitive weekly schedule. Step number 12, we had to learn human resources and how to recruit people. And step number we’ve had to learn how to do our accounting.

So step number one, Luke, talk to me about the revenue goals. I’m not asking you on the air here to share your specific numbers, but why was it so important for you to start tracking your numbers and how has that helped you? Well, initially, that was the first question that Chuck asked me, like, what is your financial goal? And at that time, it was kind of tough to identify that, which taught me that if you’re running a business, you probably should have some idea of where you are financially and where you want to go. So that was the first lesson for me, is I hadn’t identified that, and I obviously was not running business. properly, because I would say I didn’t care about the money.

Well, unless you’re a nonprofit or independently wealthy, I think you should. Moser. Yeah, and that was a thing that I see with a lot of new clients, Clay, and tell me if you see this as well, is a lot of people, they’re in the burning fires, they’re in the day -to -day, and you say, what are your revenue goals? Where are you guys at right now? And they’re like, I feel like … and that’s not a good place to be.

You need to know when it comes to your bank account, because if you run out of cash and you can’t pay your team, you are hosed, homie.

Muckerman.

Well, what you’re going to have to do is get on a whiteboard today.

Get out a whiteboard. If you don’t have a whiteboard, go buy a whiteboard. Build a whiteboard. Get a whiteboard. And I want you to write down the financial goal that you have for yourself and your business. So I’ll give an example.

Elephant in the Room, our men’s grooming lounge. I can be very transparent with the listeners. We only want to have 4 ,000 members there, okay? And we essentially already have 4 ,000 members. And what? What?

What? You mean you don’t want to grow the business? Exactly. Um, our business elephant in the room is designed to serve the, it’s designed to be a home run on the levels of the three Ps. Okay. We want to have a great profit.

We want to have great

people that work there.

And we want to make a product that we’re proud to serve the community, okay? We want to have a product or a service that we’re proud of. That’s the P number one, the product or service. Two, we want to make a profit that makes sense.

And three, we want to have great people that work there.

And so we’ve decided we’re probably going to open up a fourth store to service a different part of Tulsa. Because, Luke, whether people love the Hub Gym or not, the reality is very few people are going to drive 25 miles to get their hair cut. So for elephant in the room, I mean, there’s a lot of people that don’t come to our locations because it’s not practical to drive from the west side of the river. over to the east side of the river to get your hair cut is a general rule. And at the Hub Gym, it’s probably not super realistic for a ton of people from Owosso to drive to the Hub Gym. And so it’s kind of a deal of like, you have to know how many members that gym can support, how many members you want to get to.

And then your growth needs to be, once you hit that number, you can decide, do I want to open up another location? Do I want to just optimize this location? But I think in your mind, you have to know kind of, and I’m not asking for a number, but I think you have probably a number of how many members that gym can probably support. Yeah, and you know our initial goal was to get a thousand members and today.

We’re sitting at about 1350 yeah, and and you know so I don’t know that we’ve met that threshold, but I would say at this point maybe 2 ,000 that’s kind of what I’m thinking about 2 ,000 members But it’s so important that you write down a number out there Because we’ve had so many people approach me with elephant in the room saying hey, what if we team up like as an example? There is a local Adult beverage business they make a local IP It’s a local brewery there, Chup, and they’ve said we should team up and do a competition where whoever has the best beard wins free beer or something like that. And that’s a great idea, right? Except I don’t want to do it.

There you go.

Because I don’t want to team up.

I don’t want to be a part of the community.

I don’t want to do any events.

I don’t want to do anything at all related to local events.

We give money back.

We take a dollar for every haircut.

And we give that money back to the boys home there in Tulsa.

So when you come in to get your haircut for a dollar, the first time, that dollar goes back to the boys home. And really, I don’t want to team up with any other organization other than The Boys Home.

And Chep, why is that important that I know what charity I want to give back to and the only charity I want to give back to?

Yeah, because the business is a vehicle to serve you and get you to your goals, not everybody else’s.

So it doesn’t matter.

How many great ideas or good things that people can bring to you if it’s not on your goal list or on your schedule or your plan?

You don’t have to do it. I’ve had a ton of people come to me and say, hey, why don’t you open up a fourth location in Owasso?

Yeah.

And I haven’t done it. You know why, Chep? Because you don’t want to. Right.

And Chep, you know why I’m not doing that local brewery thing? Because you don’t want to. Right.

And you know why I’m not going to do the big old, what is it, November, the Mo -vember? where you have like a cancer awareness where you don’t shave. You know why I’m not going to do that? Because you don’t want to.

Right. Yes. And you know why I’m not going to team up with like the downtown Sobo District, the South Boston? Why I’m not going to team up with them to do some kind of local fun run?

I think it’s because you don’t want to. Right.

And these are all things I don’t want to do.

In fact, I don’t want to do anything other than to service those 4 ,000 customers and to hit the three Ps.

Great product that I’m proud of, to have great people that work there, and to have a great profit.

Don’t forget about the W. What’s that?

The wall that you live behind. That’s another thing that you like. Now step number two, right?

Step number two.

You have to establish the number of customers you need to break even. Luke, why was it so important for you to be honest with the numbers and to go, okay, this is how many members that I need just to pay the bills? Well, again, the biggest light that we shined on the thing when we first started was that I had no idea, truthfully, where I was, right?

I could surmise, I could guess, but that’s as best as it was going to get at that time.

So why it’s important is because you need to know where you’re at to determine where you’re going. Now, Chuck, this just in from our home office here.

Lee Cockrell writes, and I need some echo here, Chuck.

OK, here we go. And Matt, if you could pile on, because Chubb recently has been really off his echo game. Don’t want me in with Steve Currington. I need this to be like a prolonged echo.

So here we go.

Let me get my quotable voice ready.

Here we go.

One of the main reasons.

people don’t improve is that they are not honest with themselves. Lee Cockrell. This guy’s name is Lee Cockrell.

He’s the former executive vice president.

Make the echo stop. That was short and to the point right there. Unbelievable.

Okay. Now, Lee Cockrell is the former executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts who used to manage 40 ,000 employees. And he used to manage, again, Walt Disney World Resorts, 40 ,000 employees, 1 million customers a week. A week! At Walt Disney World Resorts. And he says one of the reasons people don’t improve so they’re not honest with themselves.

So I don’t think, Luke, you’re running around going, I want to deceive myself and not be honest. I just think we hadn’t had those discussions yet. You never thought about, OK, this is how many members I need to break even. Right. And two, what I’ve learned with working with you all is that you can either work on your business or in it.

Explain the difference. Well, when you’re working on your business, it’s sort of from a bird’s eye view, right? You’re looking at the whole picture. And when you’re working in it, that’s like selling memberships and scrubbing toilets. Oh, yes. You know, and there are only 24 hours in a day.

And so, you know, it just it’s just not effective.

And what I was trying to do was work in and on it simultaneously doing really neither very well. OK. And just a pile on Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel in their bestselling book called Scale. They write a level two business is a business that works but only because you the business owner are there every day to make it work. You make most of the decisions.

You generate most of the business. You meet with all the key clients and perform most of the important work of the business. The painful reality is that most level two business owners get caught in the self -employment trap. They’re so busy doing the job of their business that they can’t step back and focus on growing the business. What’s more, because of the way they are building the business, the more success they have, the more trapped they become inside their business. company.

So, Luke, can you explain some of the things that kind of kept you so trapped in the day -to -day of running the company that you weren’t able to take a step back and actually work on the company? Sure. So, again, I was the front desk, so that meant I was selling all of the memberships. I was the lead trainer, so that meant I was training all the people, doing all of the first steps, which is our onboarding program. And if there was a disaster, like an overflowing toilet or something. I hate to keep talking about toilets.

Those were things I had to deal with. If there’s a call in the middle of the night because we are a 24 -hour gym, it was my phone that was ringing and my car that was starting to come up to the gym to deal with that. Let me make sure the listeners out there get it. These are just some very practical tips that you can do right now to free up your time if you feel that you are trapped in the day -to -day. Chip, we’ll put this on the show notes here, okay? One is establish a rule with your team to only talk to you at your daily meeting.

So like daily, just have a huddle and establish to your team, do not call me, do not text me outside of the meeting. that particular daily huddle. And then step number two, create an org chart of who they should reach out to if they have an emergency. I see so many business owners, Chep, though, that have their phone on them. As an example, like today, every Friday, I turn my phone off at about noon, and then my phone is off until Sunday night.

And then I guess it’d be off until basically Monday at about 6 a .

m. So my phone’s off, you know, 48 to 72 hours in a row there. And some people say, how in the world can you do that? Well, I’ve established an org chart. So I have the elephant in the room.

My son was selling Boy Scout popcorn. Boy Scout popcorn this weekend.

By the way, he sold $490 of Boy Scout popcorn.

He’s got about $700 more to sell to hit his goal to go to Disney World. So we’re getting close there. But he goes the elephant in the room. So I dropped him off at 815 on Saturday.

He goes in there.

Wendy helped him. And he’s selling popcorn. I checked on him at noon. And then I checked on him at five, you know, just to make sure he’s doing good, picked him up, that kind of thing. And he’s learning the dark art of sales. But I don’t have a constant stream of text messages coming in with emergencies throughout the day.

Now, I know on Saturday at the three stores, we had at least two to three, quote unquote, emergencies. Absolutely. On Saturday, because every Saturday we have two to three emergencies. And this might blow the mind of the listeners. But every week we have. And Jeff, you’ve been in our management meetings on Monday.

Every week, do we not have some kind of emergency? Always.

You’ve got how many customers again? There’s about 4 ,000 customers, about 90 employees. How could you not? With that many employees and that many customers coming in, there are going to be issues. And if you think you can run a business that’s that interactive with the community and not have issues, you’re not telling yourself the truth. And so, you have to be proactive, like Clay’s saying, and deal with these things at once.

time instead of every single time stream of consciousness. But I think a lot of business owners, Luke, they make themselves available for every second of the day. They make themselves available because they’ve been reading a lot of these motivational books. a lot, they’ve attended a lot of these motivational seminars. And Ben Horowitz, this is a guy who sold his company, Opsware, to Hewlett Packard for $1 .6 billion. He writes, every time I read a management or self -help book, I find myself saying, that’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.

The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal.

The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the goal.

The hard thing isn’t hiring great people.

The hard thing is when those great people develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart.

The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organizational chart that you’ve just designed.

The hard thing is not dreaming big.

The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream has turned into a nightmare. Luke, have you ever found yourself in a spot at the Hub Gym previous to working with us where you felt like it had become a nightmare? Oh my gosh.

I mean, the day that I came to the first conference, I was in it. I was living it. And I remember saying, I will give this thing away.

I would have given the gym away to relieve that stress.

Thankfully, I came to your conference, and I remember talking with you.

and Zellner and saying, hey, I don’t know how to make this work based on the financial situation that Jim was in at the time, but I have to do this in order for us to move forward. And that’s the only reason that I do what I do. I love helping people achieve time freedom and financial freedom, Chuck.

And I think a lot of people just don’t know these 13 steps, and that’s why we’re stuck. And the problem is, Luke, you’ve gone to college. Eric, Chup, you’ve been to college. What college did you go to, Chup? Oklahoma State University.

And I went to Oral Roberts University. And you graduated, Chup, with a degree in what?

I have two degrees, one in management and one in marketing. And do you use any of the management things you were taught in college ever on a daily basis to either A, coach your clients, or did you use them when you ran your own business?

Let me think. Subtract that. No, zero times. Right. Basically zero times because everything they teach at college is crap. It’s it’s it’s even worse than that clay It’s like we talked about it’s all memorization even at the college level and so even if it wasn’t crap I wouldn’t remember it anyways because it’s like study here study here remember this put it on the paper now all completely different things and there’s no application at all and it’s wrong and Most of the time.

Absolutely. Or all the time. I would say all the time.

As an example, Luke. Okay, as an example.

Okay, here we go. We’re talking about step number three.

Establish the number of hours you’re willing to work in your business.

College never teaches you that.

In fact, I had a professor at one point, I remember teaching this in college, he said that if you’re a good small business owner, you need to be responsive to your customers all the time. So I know a lot of people who went to Oral Roberts University, I know these people who literally own restaurants and businesses who are now in their 40s, who work every freaking hour of the day because they believe they’re supposed to be. Another example, I remember teaching, I got asked to speak at a local college and the guy speaking before me, the professor speaking before me was talking about social media and how you need to respond to all of the comments and reviews Real time.

And he’s showing case studies of how the best companies respond to social media as soon as possible. Chuck, if I did respond to all the social media comments, could we possibly grow Elephant in the Room? No. And that’s the whole thing. Scale out those ideas, everybody. If you’ve got a new concept or a new idea, Clay talks about it on the show.

if your main marketing strategy is networking, scale that idea out. Where does that take you? Is that actually even possible? And that’s what we’re saying. It’s not even possible to respond to every single message. You wouldn’t have time to be proactive and prepare.

Luke, have you been to some of those chamber events or networking events where somebody’s speaking and telling you the importance of making sure that you’re involved in every community event, and that you network constantly, and that you need to constantly update your social media status? Have you ever seen these kinds of events? Yeah, of course.

And thankfully, my first business partner told me, you know, he kept an eye on me.

Right.

And so one day I left to one of these networking meetings.

Right.

And being the only person in the gym, that meant the gym had no one there.

I was gone for like three hours or something, networking, trying to build my business.

I wasn’t in it, so that was the last time I ever did that.

There’s one group, I can’t seem to place the name, Chup, and I don’t want you to help me figure it out either, but it’s called One Million Containers, or One Million Mugs, One Million Containers.

It’s one million things that hold beverages. Whatever that group is called. One million somethings that hold beverages. And I also call it the Mental Masturbation Festival.

And you go there and you’ll usually have a professor from the University of somewhere who will get up there and will talk to you about three hot topics.

There’s three hot topics they love to talk about.

One is the importance of being a good person.

a good community member. They love to talk about, as a business owner, give back. Second thing they talk about a lot, they love to talk about social justice and environmentalism. They love to talk about how you gotta be more responsible, social justice, you gotta recycle. Third, they love talking about how the internet is completely and the only way to market your business today is by being a social media superstar.

It doesn’t matter who speaks, but it’s usually going to be someone who speaks, who has a startup, who is failing and they get to speak and everyone’s like oh this is good i’m gonna take notes and it doesn’t matter whether you’re successful at all you just get to speak because they rotate luke look if you go to enough of these events you get to speak i don’t want to speak so you get up there you know i’m sorry have you seen these events yeah you get up there and you’re like absolutely uh my name is kevin and um i started a company that uh gives back It’s environmentally friendly, and I care a lot about the community. We turn recycled furniture into matches. These are my ways that I market on social media. Here’s what I know. Yes. Okay, Zellner told me, he said, you know, if you want to operate as a non -profit, do that.

Right. Start a non -profit, but you’re in business to make money. Make the money. Right, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Right? No.

But some people have this idea that they need to be serving the community. Well, you can’t serve the community if you’re broke. Bam. Right? That’s right. So it, you know, you just got to scrap that now.

Okay.

Step number three, though, you got to determine the number of hours that you’re willing to work.

So I’m telling you specifically, if you want to run a company, this is how you get your schedule as small as possible.

These are the hours you have to work. One, you have to do the weekly group interview. That’s one hour weekly.

You have to interview all your candidates.

That’s one hour. Hour two, you have to have an all -staff meeting every week.

Every week, you have to have an all -staff meeting every week, okay? You’ve got to do a group interview, all -staff meeting.

Three, this is the third hour, you have to do your accounting one hour a week. You have to look at your numbers at least one hour a week, all right? Four, you have to do a daily huddle.

Now, if you’re able to run a company effectively, you should be able to do that.

company and only need to work there about seven hours a week. That’s about all you should need to work. Now, if you want to work zero hours a week, like my main man Dr. Z does, then you want to hire a very effective manager like Monty. And effective managers usually are about $80 ,000 to $100 ,000 a year. So before you go out there and say you want to have… This is what’s so ridiculous, Chup.

There’s so many stupid events where they talk about passive income. I want to go off for a little bit.

I feel like I haven’t gone off about passive income.

Please. I feel like it’s been a long time since I’ve gone off. Can you be passive about it, though?

Okay, real quick.

Passive income.

How in the crap can you make passive income? So let’s think about all the ways that you can’t make passive income, but that people claim you have.

Matt, have you ever heard about making passive income?

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so let’s get into multilevels first.

So, this is how you make passive income. Step one, convince your friend to auto -ship a product that’s unproven to work, that has been made and tested in some ambiguous laboratory in Europe.

That you probably don’t even need to begin with.

Right.

And you want them to auto -ship whatever the crap is, and they need to auto -ship more crap than they could ever possibly consume.

If it’s toothpaste, they need to auto -ship more toothpaste than they could possibly ever use.

If it’s supplements, they need to auto -ship more supplements than they could ever possibly use.

Well, they have to, because if they’re going to build their down leg, Clay, then they have to go about that downlay. But even under that paradigm, you have to get in touch with your team every month to make sure their cards go through.

When the cards get declined, you’ve got to motivate them to give you a new card. You’ve got to talk to them about the future of the product.

There’s nothing passive about multi -level. In fact, step number one. Destroy all of your relationships and exchange them for a paycheck. That’s step one. Then step two, continue harassing and beating up your friends every month to get that passive check. I gotta get that Mercedes, man.

Please preach.

Gotta get that.

Okay, so that’s that. Let’s do real estate.

Okay, that’s passive, man.

Have you ever had a tenant?

Chubb, have you ever rented a property to somebody?

No.

Have you, Luke?

I have not, but I know about this.

Okay, let me tell you about this. Step one, you get a good property. Oh yeah. You take care of that property.

Fix it up. In my case, I rented it to a guy that I knew very, very well. I’ve seen the photos of this said property.

I rented the property to a guy I know very, very well.

A guy who had a good background. I thought, this guy will be a good renter.

He’s a good guy. And so he decides to use my deck as a backdrop for his graffiti art. True story. He decides to remove my ceiling fans and to bring them to his new office. He decides to remove my built -in bookshelves and he decides to pull them out. I had a lion head, a decorative lion head where water came out of a fountain.

He decided to just remove that and he won’t tell me where it is. He decided to not mow the lawn for usually 60 days at a time. Take the fence down too, right? So every time that his check bounced or didn’t go through or he couldn’t pay, we’d show up at the property to collect the money. And it looked like he was trying to take his front lawn and turn it back to the native Oklahoma prairie. It was like Jumanji, right?

It looked like he was building the gathering place, all that local grass that’s growing. It was like Amazon. Tunnels and bridges everywhere. It was crazy.

It was.

Nothing passive about real estate, nothing passive about multi -level, nothing passive about having a business. Luke, how passive is the staffing of the Hub Gym?

Could you just disappear?

here for 90 days and come back and I’m sure you’d have a great staff.

I don’t know the name of any of my staff.

No, it’s not passive.

What are you talking about? People teach that crap all the time. You have to touch base.

You have to touch base with your staff.

It’s not even a realistic goal.

There’s so many books. If you have a book out there written about passive income, burn it.

No, I tell you what.

Bring the book to my office.

Yes.

Bring it to the Thrive 15 headquarters.

Bring your book.

Bring your book.

If you have a book out there about passive income, please bring the book to the Thrive 15 headquarters in Jinx.

It’s at the Riverwalk, 1100 Riverwalk Terrace. Bring the book to 1100 Riverwalk Terrace. Bring your book about passive income.

Bring it.

And I’m going to do, I promise you I’ll do two things.

One, I will burn it.

Step two, I will pee on it.

Right there in the chiminea.

I will, I promise you.

Now I’m not going to let you watch because you don’t need to be seeing that kind of thing.

But you have to, because it’s not even a realistic goal.

That’s right. Why would you want that anyways?

It just doesn’t even make sense.

Seriously, you say, well Dr. Z has passive income. Dr. Z has managers, and they’re not passive. He has to maintain the relationship. That’s what I was going to say.

He touches base with them every week, and there’s an org chart, and everybody knows. But there’s so many people pursuing passive income. Have you been watching YouTube videos from some guy from Australia? Hey, mate. Hello. Oh, good to see you there.

I didn’t see you. Didn’t see you there.

Here I am.

Look at me.

There’s some attractive ladies behind me. I’m at my pool and I want to teach you eight ways to make passive income overnight.

Overnight income. I make over $9 ,000 a month from my laptop.

No, you don’t.

You don’t.

Why are you recording this commercial right now, you liar? Why is this even a goal?

Right. It’s unbelievable.

And I see the chambers give you a goal like, your business should reinvigorate downtown. What? How is that a goal? Your business? Downtown should reinvigorate itself, so I move my business down there.

So step four, you have to determine your unique value proposition. This is what makes you different.

Now, Seth Godin calls this the purple cow.

Eric, if you had to describe what makes the Hub Gym different from other gyms, how would you describe that?

Well, first of all, I would describe just the look of inside the gym.

A lot of the gyms, the big box ones you go to, they’re very sterile.

It’s all the same. Everything looks exactly the same. And you can tell Luke has taken time to plan out each workout area. There’s inspiration. There’s art everywhere all over the walls. It’s eclectic, but not in the homeless kind of eclectic way.

And we’re going to continue taking it to the next level. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it’s going to continue getting better. He’s got a Gorilla.

I mean, come on, man. Oh, yeah.

Can you tell us about the Gorilla, Luke? Man, this guy is great.

When you told me, buy an inflatable gorilla, I thought, what in the heck are you thinking, right?

He didn’t say that.

He just did it, and that’s a good thing.

If Clay says it, I’m doing it. Let’s just do it. But we put him out randomly, as weather permits. And people pull in.

It’s crazy.

Isn’t it crazy to large inflatable gorilla? How tall is this gorilla? I literally think he’s like 20, 30 feet, something crazy. I don’t know. And people just show up. They drive in, and they specifically mention the gorilla.

Exactly. So it’s a purple cow. Now, a purple cow, according to Seth Godin, Seth Godin, the best -selling author who sold his company, Yo -Yo Dine, to Yahoo for $30 million, writes, in a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. Not standing out is the same as being invisible.

Boring is invisible. Remarkable people and products get talked about. So I ask you there, Mr. Thriver, Mrs. Thriver, what makes your company unique?

Think about that.

Really think about how can you make your product stand out in a crowded marketplace? Now step five, you’ve got to improve that branding. Now the branding is, I think a lot of people can get woo -woo about this chap. There’s a lot of woo -woo. So I’m going to read the notable quotable and i’d like to have matt break it down because matt you work at the thrive time show offices i’d love to get your take on this you are not a business coach right i’m not asking you to be one but you are a guy you’re a man of the world no you know what’s going on okay here we go this is what michael levine by the way michael levine uh my wife and i just uh signed michael levine to be our p arkansas that’s right so michael levine he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Prince, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan.

Pizza Hut. And for myself. Myself. So this is what he says.

He says, if you give someone a present and you give it to them in a Tiffany box, it’s likely that they’ll believe that the gift has a higher perceived value than if you gave it to them in no box or a box of less prestige.

That’s not because the receiver of the gift is a fool, but instead because we live in a culture in which we gift wrap everything. Our politicians, our corporate heads, our movie and TV stars, and even our toilet paper. Matt, why does branding matter so much? Because branding’s all in the mind of the buyer.

If you can make your product or your service stand out and it seem like it’s worth more, well then, in their mind, it is worth more.

So Luke, we’ve had to go out there and optimize your website, the look of it.

We’ve had to optimize your logo. We’ve had to optimize your one sheet. We’ve had to optimize your marketing videos. We’ve had to optimize signage, optimize exterior lighting. And we’re really never done optimizing things. We talked about on Friday some neat things that are going to be updated in the gym.

Can you talk to me about how branding has impacted your business the most? Yeah, absolutely. So we have the U in our logo, right? My wife and I spend a lot of time thinking about those things. It’s you, babe. It’s all about you.

And there is a sign with our U on it.

and another place in town, and people are recognizing it, right?

And initially it was, you’re not Nike, so the swoosh doesn’t work. And it’s working now.

The people recognize the U, and it’s synonymous with the hub. And your idea to embroider the U on your head is a really controversial idea. I’m glad you haven’t pulled the trigger on that one yet. Now, step number six, you want to create a three -legged marketing stool.

Now, a lot of people get woo -woo about this, Chuck.

Woo -woo, woo -woo. They feel like marketing is a theoretical, always -changing event of the week. Event of the week. People feel like marketing is the event of the week. Clay, it’s getting stale.

We’ve got to change it up. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to read to you a notable quotable from Chet Holmes. Chet Holmes is the best -selling author of The Ultimate Sales Machine. He was a partner of Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett’s partner. This is Chet Holmes. His book is called The Ultimate Sales Machine.

He passed away a few years back, but I want to read you his notable quotable.

He says, The missing ingredient for nearly all of the thousand -plus clients I’ve worked with directly to improve their business is pig -headed discipline and determination.

We all get good ideas at seminars and from books. radio talk shows, and business building gurus. The problem is that most companies do not know how to identify and adapt the best ideas to their business. Implementation, not ideas, is the real key to success. So Luke, can you share what the three -legged marketing stool is that we’ve been applying, implementing there at the Hub Gym? I can.

So we have been running Facebook ads. Facebook ads. Do we ever turn them off?

Never, and it’s never changed, right?

Yes, I’m still running it, it’s working. And then we do Google Ads as well, and AdRoll. Retargeting ads, they follow you around.

Search engine optimization.

I want to make sure we’re recapping the moves here, okay? We never stop optimizing the website. This month we’re putting back about, I think about $2 ,000 into search engine optimization. We never are done.

We are never done gathering reviews from our real clients.

We’re never done running our Google ads.

Never done with our retargeting ads.

Never done with our Facebook ads. Now you’ve said, Clay, I thought it was a three -legged marketing stool.

The way it works is you don’t want

add a new leg until you have three stable legs.

Right.

So let me just give you an example.

This podcast, Chup, as of the time of the recording of today’s show, we’re approaching 1 ,400 podcasts you can find at Thrivetimeshow . com. That’s a pile. Now, why is it important that we don’t add any other kind of marketing until we can consistently just record one podcast a day? Why was it so important for us just to start one podcast a day before we launched retargeting ads? Well, one thought is that you’ve got to be fruitful and then multiply right so do what you’re doing and then the other thing is you’ve got to measure you don’t want to go jump out there with 12 legs to your marketing system because it’s going to be too much to measure and you won’t know if your resources are being allocated properly and Luke and I’ve done this we’ve gone through this we know who is ideal and likely buyers are right we know the average age the average income where they’re from you know, where their kids go to school.

We’re not going to be running a lot of ads to go after South Tulsa for a gym in Broken Arrow because people just aren’t going to drive from 151st or 111th and Memorial over to the Hub Gym. But people who live in the Broken Arrow area love the gym. If you’re living around the Lynn Lane area, the Elm area, anywhere in Broken Arrow, people love it. It’s convenient. If you live over there by Rayma, if you live over there by the Lowe’s or the Warren Theater. And those are the people that are going to see the ads.

Right. And also, if you’re into the concept of Roid Rage, you probably won’t like the Hub Gym. No. It’s not a gym where there’s a lot of, it’s not their niche. How much does it cost a month to go to the Hub Gym? So after the initial month for only a dollar, you’re looking at a whopping $29 a month for full access to the club 24 -7.

And the ads won’t work unless you have a no -brainer. That’s right. So you can have all the ads in the world, but what gets you the entrance into the game, the golden look, is having a no -brainer. Tell us again. Luke, what’s your no -brainer?

So your first month is only a dollar. What? And you can find that on thehubgym .

com or on Facebook, check out our ads. Shirley, you can’t be serious. I am very serious. I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. A lot of people, though, get hung up on that.

They say there’s no way possible that you could run a gym and have your first month be a dollar. How is it possible, Luke? Well, I remember when we first started talking about this, and I thought, offer a dollar.

The doors are going to be flooded.

I’m not going to be everybody’s.

And that just isn’t the case. It’s just a good leader to get people in, have a great experience.

And it’s working.

I mean, yeah, I don’t know how. I don’t know the math behind it, but it is. And we’re going to continue doing it.

Now, as we talk about step number seven, before we get into step seven, which is creating a sales conversion system, I’d like for Matt to be able to ask you a few questions. Because Matt, you’ve often talked about, I know you want to eventually own your own business someday, and you’re also involved with the ministry. Luke is doing it. There’s a lot of people that talk about doing it, but he’s doing it. Luke has done it. He’s done a lot of these steps, and now we’re just scaling the steps.

Do you have any questions for Luke about implementation? Because so many people talk about wanting to grow their company, but as they begin to grow the company, Chuck, they mentally cannot handle growth.

I see a ton of people that say, I want to grow my company, I want to grow my company, and then we help them grow the company and they can’t mentally handle it.

So here we have a real example of a real guy who’s doing it.

The Hub Jim, Luke Owens.

Matt, do you have any questions for Luke about implementation?

did you choose the marketing methods that you chose? Why not a billboard or a TV spot? Why internet marketing? Here’s what’s cool about working with Thrive. You don’t have to think about those things. It was never a question of, hey, are we going to spend $2 ,000 a month on

a billboard? If that makes sense in the future, we’ll talk about that. But they have a proven system, and you just have to be willing to follow it. And that just wasn’t one. There were a couple of things we talked about initially, and we tried them. They work.

If we tried them and they didn’t work, we didn’t keep doing them. That’s a very different, what you just said Luke, it’s very different than most marketing firms or even most businesses. Most businesses try a new form of marketing every week. That’s wasting a lot of resources. Can you talk to me about what it was like when you were running your business with the idea of the week? It always happened to be a new fun run, or a new marketing idea, or a new social media strategy, or a new t -shirt, or a new banner, or a new print piece, or a new ad in a magazine.

Talk to me what that felt like. Well, exactly how I just felt when you were listing all those off. Crazy, right? And so, you know, what you’ve taught me is that the business is to work for you. And that’s how it’s contrary, right? I was working for the business, which meant I never saw my family.

My first son, I think I literally never put him to bed or woke up with him the first few years, at least, of his life.

And because I was always at that next event or, you know, behind the computer creating something new, it was always a reactionary existence.

And so, yeah, that’s not… I want to walk the listeners, Chup, inside the mind of the average business owner that’s doing Ideas of the Week marketing.

Oh, boy.

So here we go.

Here we go.

Amazon. Automobile raps. Mess mailers. Mess texting. Mess voicemails. AdWords.

Blog -based advertising. Automobile raps. Mess emails. Mess email.

AWeber.

constant contact, SurveyMonkey, business development partnership deals, buying, merging, selling, celebrity endorsement, cold call marketing, door -to -door sales, Dream 100, email marketing, textbook advertising, flyers, Google Maps, Google reviews, Google shopping, Maybe I should do magazine advertising.

Maybe mall shopping center traffic. Outdoor signage. Newspaper advertising. Pandora. Pay -per -click. Spotify.

Pop -up shops.

Public relations.

Celebrity tie -in strategy. Expert strategy. Giveback strategy. National news tie -in. The chamber ads. Buy an ad.

Yellow pages. Do those still work?

Yelp. YouTube advertising. Valpak. Trade show advertising. Text marketing. Targeting online ads.

Television advertising. Social media. Spotify. Maybe I should be a public speaker. Maybe I should write a book. Maybe I should get a sign flipper.

Maybe I should do search engine advertising. Where do I start? What’s new? Maybe I’ll go on YouTube. I just read a blog.

Google’s changed everything. Google’s changed everything.

Oh my crap!

Google’s changed everything!

This is what happens.

That’s inside the mind.

Inside the mind of idea of the week marketing. It will cause you insanity and then soon you’ll live in a van down by the river. Okay, now step number seven. creating a sales conversion system. This is the part where everybody has to do this. And when people don’t fight you, like Luke, it’s awesome.

Okay, here’s what happens is step one, you got to write a call script, got to get that, got to get that boom, boom, boom, boom, that boom, boom, got to have that call script, got to get that. Why do you have to have a call script? or you’ll end up with a hashtag tattoo on your wrist.

So we were in the office and Chup said, hey, why don’t you make a sales call?

And I said, awesome, I can do that. I’ve been doing this for years. He’s like, where’s your script? I don’t need a script. We get on the phone and I have – Right there in the meeting, it was great.

It was crazy town. And so the phone answers, and I start to speak, and I lose my mind.

And then I start cursing on the phone, like, I don’t know what to say.

This is still live.

And then I realize it’s live, and so I just hang up.

And we all lose our mind.

Like, what are you doing? And then, you know, he brings Marshall in to share in this awesomeness. And Marshall says, why didn’t you just hit the pound sign? I guess that stops the call or does something.

It was a voicemail.

You were leaving a voicemail.

Which you should never do.

And so now I have an awesome hashtag tattoo on my wrist. It’s a reminder of that one epic fail.

I never want to forget that. You’ve got to create an inbound sales script and an outbound sales script, okay? Then you have to have a pre -written email that goes out.

Pre -written emails. You’ve got to have pre -written text messages. You’ve got to create a sales one sheet. And you’ve got to use Clarity Voice or some recording program to record your calls. And in your case, Luke, you guys are more of a gym than like a personal training business, right? But let’s say in the gym, or if you have a personal training company, you’ve got to install cameras.

And why do you have to install cameras in the actual gym? How is that helpful when you put cameras in the gym? Well, you can review what your staff and your clients are doing.

You’re dealing with people, right? So things happen, and you definitely don’t want to be about somebody’s opinion or word. You want to know.

and be able to verify.

determine the sustainable customer acquisition costs. Why is it so important that we track every single week, Luke, how much you’re spending on advertisement and how many new members you’re getting? Well, because that converts to a cost per member and you want to make sure that you’re converting at a rate or the money you’re spending is converting those members at that rate, at the cost. And you can scale it up then. Right, right. If you know it’s $40 per new member, then you can decide if you’re going to scale it up.

That’s right. And this is the first steps to let’s take the hub jam or elephant in the room, right? You know if your no -brainer is working based on knowing these numbers. If you don’t know what these numbers are, you don’t have your customer acquisition cost, and you don’t necessarily know if your no -brainer is a good deal for you as a business owner.

I see so many people saying, I’m not going to spend any money on advertising. I’m going to market on social media. Oh, yeah. What’s that gonna cost you? Your whole day? Yeah, your whole day writing your viral tweets, you genius you.

Yeah, telling people that already know about you about you.

Like, that doesn’t help.

You know, Clay, you’ve had me over the last week or so start really diving in to the, uh… to the expenses and income of the gym, right?

That’s all we’ve been doing. Because we’ve been growing, and that’s great. We’re over 70 % growth. But we’re noticing, where is that? And so we start looking at that, and we get to see where we’re spending money.

You say, make cuts.

Well, before, a couple of weeks ago, I would have said, there’s nothing to cut.

And we’ve cut over $2 ,000 a month. $2 ,000 a month. So we’ve generated $24 ,000 a year of extra income as a result of just cutting things. And by the way, no one got laid off. No. We didn’t sit there and fire people.

We just got rid of unneeded expenses.

And it’s very easy for those expenses to creep up by entropy, by default. They just happen. So you’ve got to be very mindful of your expenses.

Now, step number nine.

Once you’ve begun to sell things and you’re growing, now you’ve got to create repeatable processes.

Essentially, don’t over -spiritualize this.

You’ve got to have a checklist for everything.

Luke, how has having a checklist for everything helped you?

you?

It’s helped me immensely.

It’s sitting right next to me here on the table, and what that allows me to do is say no to a lot of things.

If you’re not on my list, and it’s, you know, it’s just something I don’t have to say yes to, right?

And so it’s allowed me to say no, and it keeps things out of my mind.

I don’t have to remember everything, which, in turn, It means I’m going to forget everything.

It’s right there on the list.

It’s awesome.

It’s allowed you to duplicate yourself within the business, right?

Oh my gosh, yeah.

Like you were saying, you don’t have to be there 24 -7 every single day because you’ve created these systems and processes for your team to use, right? How do I clean the bathroom? How do I open the gym up? How do I restock the shelves? How do I clean the equipment? It’s all in a process and a checklist.

Right. And I could – I don’t want anybody else. I just want a business that serves myself.

Oh, it serves myself.

I don’t want anybody else.

Anything else?

Oh no.

Oh no.

God, that song is so good and so gross.

You remember that? You remember that song?

You remember that song?

What? I want a business that serves myself?

No, do you remember that?

Do you remember the original?

Of course I remember the original!

Do you do?

Yes!

Really? When I think about Clay. No, do you remember that song? Yes, yes, absolutely.

Luke, do you remember that song?

Yes, I do.

Matt, do you not remember that song?

Nope.

Really?

Nope.

When I think about you, I touch my…

Whoa.

Okay.

Ah! It’s a group I called The Divinals, all right? And it says, I love myself.

I want you to love me.

When I feel down, I want you above me. I search myself. Come on, Chubb. I want you to find me. I forget myself.

I want you to remind me. I think that was before my time. When were you born? What year? 93.

93?

I feel like that song came out probably in 93.

That was the year of you, man. That song came out, let’s see what year. Can you find out what song? 1990.

Dude, that was three years before your birth. Here’s my theory. You were conceived to that song. Oh, no. Yes. Three years later.

Yes.

Now we have a Matt.

It took a while for it to happen, but it was a three -year process. They would just crank up those jams every night. It would create that loving feeling. And all of a sudden, Matt emerges on the scene. Oh, God. This is the, hey, Chubb, this is the circle.

Yes. This is the circle. It all comes back. It’s the same gestation period. This is imaging.

As in, oh, what?

Oh, wow.

Okay, nice. Okay, we move on now.

Now, step number 10, the management and execution.

Why has it been so important for you to learn how to manage people, and how are you managing people differently now than you used to? I’ll make that a simple statement.

I managed from emotion before, period.

right, tried to make everybody happy. He got so emotional, baby. Every time he managed his people, he got so emotional, baby.

Then he screwed it up.

Sorry. Lost his time. No, but seriously, when you manage emotionally, what happens, dude?

It just doesn’t work.

You’re that, you know, what do you say, click funnels or whatever? You become that. You become that, right? Because everybody’s coming to you about their story and about what’s going on in their life. all the while yours is – Let me give you an example. Let me just give you an example of what terrible management looks like so you guys can get this idea.

It’s where you give someone a task to do, right? And you say, I need you to go to the store and purchase paper. Yep. And I need you to shut the door every day, lock the gym on your way out. Lock the gym. I need you to purchase paper today, and I need you to clean the bathrooms.

If you feel like it. And then every time you follow up with the person, every time you follow up, right, because you’ve now been to a motivational event, you’ve read the first chapter of a management book, you then follow up for the first time. And all employees have the following three excuses until you learn how to become a good manager.

All employees have the same excuses until you learn how to become an effective manager.

Now, the employees that don’t give you these excuses are what we would call A players, and that would represent 20 % of the workforce.

But everybody else has these three. I’m sure you’ve heard these. They say, I forgot. That’s excuse number one, I forgot. I forgot. The second thing they’d say is there was a miscommunication, right?

And the third is they just simply choose not to, but they have an emotional justification for it. Oh yeah. Did you ever run into those things, Luke, where people just emotionally gave you a justification for not getting something done?

All of the time. And when you’re emotional, they’re going to be emotional. Period. That’s how it works. So now how do you manage now? How’s it different?

It’s very cut and dry.

We set expectations.

We hold people accountable.

And if you choose not to do it more than about once, we’re just going to move on.

And when you stop acting in that emotional sphere, that emotional realm, you stop saying yes to everything, right? And you begin saying no. And that’s where your time freedom creation begins, because you’re saying no to things that are not on your goal list. That’s right. And as we wrap up today’s show, we have step 11, 12, and 13, which you couldn’t manage people effectively if you don’t do these next three steps, OK? So step 11 is you have a repeatable weekly schedule.

You now have a weekly staff meeting. and you have daily huddles where you know if something’s weird before it gets out of control. You know if somebody’s operating below the standard quickly so you can nip it in the bud. You’re not waiting for a quarter to go by or a year to go by. Colleges would encourage you to give people an annual review. How insincere is an annual employee review?

You meet with somebody at the end of the year, and you just remember the last things they did in the last two weeks. and then that somehow becomes a summary of their annual, no, what you do is you make people, you have a weekly schedule where you have a weekly staff meeting and a daily huddle and if something gets weird you can nip it in the bud because you have a repeatable schedule that your employees can count on. You must create a sustainable and repetitive weekly schedule. Step 12, human resources and recruitment. You’re never done doing the group interview.

Why can you never stop doing the group interview, Luke? Well, I don’t want to be behind the desk selling memberships anymore, so I’ve got to have people in the batter’s box, if you will. Nice. Now, step 13, you’ve got to do your accounting and automate the earning of money. What you have to do is you have to sit there and do your accounting, and you’ve got to be intense about paying yourself first. In your mind, you’ve got to automate this concept of, I’m going to pay myself first.

I’m going to do my accounting, and the way I do accounting with you, I’ve been helping you the last month or so on this, it’s very active. Offense meets accounting. Accounting typically is something people do if they have time, but we make it an aggressive thing. And we’re aggressively cutting wasteful spending. We’re aggressively focusing on paying you.

And why is it so important that we focus on paying you, Luke?

Well, I’ve got a certain level of lifestyle that I want to attain.

You know, I have three children and a beautiful wife and a dog. They all need food and shelter. So it’s kind of one of those things. And I don’t want to work. 80 hours a week like I have for the last 12 years. By default, you weren’t paying yourself.

No, I was not. Everybody who worked there was making more than you were. I’ll tell you, doing this active management of the funds, we found over $4 ,000 in errors uh yes day before yesterday yep we would not have found those we that would have been gone for the month which skews everything i was able to deposit that money into the bank you’ve got to be a about your accounting and schedule a weekly time to do your accounting. My name’s Clay Clark. I’m a business coach.

I do this because I believe in you. I believe in your power to change. I know that you have the capacity and the tenacity needed to succeed, but you cannot get anything done unless you’re willing to take action. Hi, my name is Tim Johnson. I’m the owner of Tuscaloosa Ophthalmology, as well as Southern Eye Consultants, two ophthalmology practices in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And I’m a client of Clay Clark.

He asked me to answer a couple of questions. The first question was, how did I hear about Clay Clark? I am a big fan of business podcasts, and his podcast popped up. as a recommended listening. So I started listening to the podcast. I was a little suspicious or skeptical because I thought there was going to be like an upcharge or an upsell, but the idea of the month -to -month canceling really appealed to me and I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and for the upsell or for the scam to come in, but it never did.

It’s very legitimate. Since working with Clay, I’ve gotten a much firmer grasp on how business works. Even in medicine, business is business. I’ve learned a lot about marketing, especially how Google reviews work and how important that is. That’s very important, even in medicine. At least once a week, if not every day, I get a new patient because somebody Googled eye doctor in Tuscaloosa.

or ophthalmologist in Tuscaloosa. And you’d be amazed how many patients just look for an eye doctor that way. And so he’s really changed our business. Our business has grown a lot.

maybe 15 to 20 % this year. And so we’re really grateful for the things he’s done for our business. And the last question was, when did I perfect the laugh? I would say that you can never perfect the laugh. You just keep working at it and just keep getting better and better each day, but you got to keep working at it. Thanks.

Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 % to 42 % increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers.

Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth -to -mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proven turnkey marketing and coaching system. that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, graduated in 1983, and then I did my pediatric dental residency at Baylor College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. I established my practice here in Tulsa in 1985.

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

My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself.

I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean, I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63 ,000 embezzlement. I lost multiple employees.

Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult.

He helped me in securing the business loans.

He helped me with web development.

and search engine optimization.

We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web.

With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business.

I’m Dr. Chad Edwards, and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic.

Hi, my name is Tim Johnson.

I’m the owner of Tuscaloosa Ophthalmology, as well as Southern Eye Consultants, two ophthalmology practices in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

And I’m a client of Clay Clark. He asked me to answer a couple of questions. The first question was, how did I hear about Clay Clark? I am a big fan of business podcasts, and his podcast popped up. as a recommended listening. So I started listening to the podcast.

I was a little suspicious or skeptical. because I thought there was going to be like an upcharge or an upsell, but the idea of the month -to -month canceling really appealed to me, and I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and for the upsell or for the scam to come in, but it never did.

It’s very legitimate.

Since working with Clay, I’ve gotten a much firmer grasp on how business works. Even in medicine, business is business.

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

Our business has grown a lot, maybe 15 to 20 % this year.

And so we’re really grateful for the things he’s done for our business.

And the last question was, when did I perfect the laugh?

I would say that you can never perfect the laugh, you just keep working at it. just keeps getting better and better each day. But you gotta keep working at it. Bride Nation, on today’s show, I’m very excited for you to hear this success story about this wonderful couple that, Sean, I would describe them as they are killing the game in the most non -violent way possible. They’re killing the game in the most non -violent way possible. They are blowing up in a good way.

Folks, I’m telling you, these folks are really growing their business. And what makes them great is they’re really kind, hardworking, diligent people.

And we’re honored to serve them.

We’ve got Jenny and Mike here joining us. Jenny and Mike, welcome to The Thrive Time Show. How are you two? Hi.

Thank you.

Good. We’re doing well. OK. I’ll start with you, Jenny, because frankly, Sean likes you more.

No, I’m just kidding.

So how did you first discover us and the business coaching that we provide? Um, so I was listening to different podcasts about business. I was starting up our business. Um, and so you were the first one to pop up on, on our podcast on Apple. I think Apple is what I was on. And so I started listening to you.

I got on your website and I was just a little girl starting a business. And I said, I’m going to, I’m going to ask this guy to be my coach. And I don’t think I’m going to get a shot, but sure enough, within a week, you caught me. Now, who is this cute, cute child here, but Micah, who is this cute kid here? That’s Lennon Rose. She is about to be 10 months old.

I hate to do this to you, but can you kind of hold up the baby to the camera a little bit?

Oh, look at this cute baby. What a great baby.

Quality baby.

That’s a healthy baby.

So Mike, can you tell us, what’s the name of your website there?

I think people want to look you up and verify you’re real people that don’t just happen to have a cute baby. Yeah. Our website is newconcept . healthcare. newconcept . healthcare.

So newconcept .

healthcare. I’m going to pull it up right now, folks, so we can all verify that they’re not just a couple who’s taking advantage of the cute baby they have to get a podcast here. This is a real couple, because I’m pulling it up here. So this is the website.

It’s newconcept . healthcare. And can you tell our listeners, what services do you guys provide at newconcept . healthcare? So, we offer more functional medicine, so we offer IV therapies, we offer hormone replacement therapies.

We also do acute care. We do pretty much everything, but we’re. very much alternative. Um, so we believe in medical freedom and, um, that’s what we offer. And, um, you guys, you reached out, uh, do you remember that initial consultation there? Do you remember, uh, Mike, that initial consultation?

Uh, did you, do you remember what that was like? Uh, yeah, it was actually pretty overwhelming that when we started in this business with absolutely nothing and we had the opportunity to work with five times.

Now, well, you know, the one thing I always try to do is, you know, my father, great guy, may he rest in peace.

He worked his tail off like so many people do. And there was no real economic results that was achieved from it. There wasn’t any, you know, he had the college degree. He’s working two jobs. I remember he’s late thirties. He’s working at Domino’s delivering pizzas, working at QuickTrip.

He worked at furniture stores. And I always try to look at every new client we have as though I’m talking to my dad, you know, because like, what would, what, what would my dad, you know, what could he have learned at the age of 37 that could have changed the financial trajectory of his life? You know, and I try to look at it that way. And, um, so you guys, I paired you up with Sean. You’ve been working with Sean, I believe Sean, since, uh, October of 2020. Is that correct?

I think that’s when they started their business. It wasn’t until about April of 2021. So April of 2021. And at that point, from that point to now, Sean, how much growth have you guys achieved from 2021 to now? Do you know that number?

Yeah, I mean, we’re sitting at 2023 revenues were $821 ,000. And they’re in October of 2020, like they only had a few months. They made about $95 ,000. end of 2020. And then we grew significantly that first year, about 375 % to 588 ,000. And we continued to grow there ever since all the way up to where we’re getting close to the million dollar mark at this point.

here, just like three years in. Jenny, how would you describe the growth? Would you say you’ve doubled? Are you five times larger? How would you describe that? Oh, no, I definitely feel the growth.

There’s been some growing pains, and you guys have helped us through that, too.

So it’s been amazing. It’s been amazing to help people, because that’s what I’m passionate about. And you guys have really helped us expand and tell people what we’re about. So step one here, we do this with all the clients. I’m going to walk people through the steps. We really needed to nail down your branding.

And that’s a big thing, because branding is to humans what clothing is. So as an example, you know, you wake up today, folks, if you run around and you’re streaking through life, you’re probably not going to get a lot of conversations started. So we all have to be intentional about, you know, what are we going to wear? Are we going to wear a tie?

Are we going to wear a polo? Are we going to do makeup? Are we not? So people, they judge us based on our appearance. And so we really had to get a website built We had to optimize the online brand. Jenny, we do it all included for our clients, so we don’t refer you to another vendor.

We do it all. Can you talk about the impact that that has made on the business? Oh, for sure. Just the website itself, it looks so great.

We would have never been able to make it look that great. The way y ‘all optimize everything and keep us with Google, just awesome. you know, where people search us and we’re the first people that come up. And that’s actually how we’ve established our business and started offering some of the things that we offer is because of the tags that we have.

I didn’t originally start off as doing IV therapy, but due to people Googling, you know, healthcare functional medicine, I had three phone calls in a week that said, hey, do you offer IV therapy?

And it was very interesting. And I was like, well, no, but I can. And so it was because of you guys that that kind of snowballed and took effect. So yeah, there’s a lot that you guys have done for us. Now, Sean, we’re working with Dr. wonderful clients here.

I’ll pick on Mike here. You know, you always say great things about Mike and Jenny. You’re always, what makes them good to work with? Because I want to make sure for anybody out there, if you go to thrivetimeshow . com, I consistently offer a free 13 point assessment. I’ve been doing that since 2005.

I do it without reservation. There’s no obligation, but there’s usually about 10, one to two knuckleheads a week that will fill out the form and probably 20 really great people that fill out the form. And then we only take on 160 clients. And so I don’t want anyone to waste their time. What makes Mike so great to work with? Well, Clay, I mean, you, when I first started coaching, you taught me about these, you know, these two types of business owners.

There’s the happy hopers out there, and then there’s the diligent doers. And I think these guys are a great example of the diligent doer. They continually apply effort to work on their business, not just in their business. They consistently show up to their meetings. They track all of the critical numbers of their business, and they are, they’re aware of what’s going on with all of their employees. They’re paying attention to all the little things going on.

They’re keeping all the plates spinning, and they ask great questions. They actually really do make a great effort consistently to apply our systems and help their business grow. And it’s been working. So step one, we get the branding nailed down. That’s the website, the print pieces, the logos, the business cards. But then you have to develop that online reputation.

Now, that could be a tough thing to do, Jenny. And again, this isn’t a backhanded compliment. I’m just saying, but for people that are humble, and very kind, of which I would put Jenny in that category.

Sometimes asking for reviews is more difficult, because you almost feel like you’re self -promoting.

I’ve never had this conversation with you. But has that been difficult for you to ask people to give you video reviews and Google reviews after you provided the service? Or was that easy for you to do? It’s not easy. It still isn’t easy. It’s difficult because you feel like you’re begging for something even though you know you did the right thing.

So it’s difficult for me.

It’s just my personality type, but we get it done anyways.

I’ll find this for the diligent, kind customers we work with.

It’s very difficult sometimes to ask for those objective reviews from real customers. And I find that from my clients I’ve worked with that are sort of like self -described barbarians. I had a guy years ago I worked with. I won’t mention his name or his industry, but I’ll just say he’s obsessed with physical fitness. And he told me, he says, I’m kind of a business barbarian. You tell me what to do and I will slay the dragons.

And I’m like, okay, you need to get Google reviews from everybody you’ve ever worked with. And he’s like, oh, I’m on it. And this guy’s just shamelessly calling through his phone and just lighting people up going, give me a review. Come on, give me a review. Why would you not give me a review? I’m like, go ahead, dial it down a little bit.

So again, you guys are humble, diligent doers. You’re the ideal person here. So I appreciate you sharing that. The next thing we had to do is we had to create a no brainer.

Now, a no -brainer is an offer so good, so amazing, that people simply cannot say no to it.

Now, I won’t mention the name of the company, but I worked years ago, and I still work with this company. They’re a medical company. They’re doing well now. And for whatever reason, they put on their website, first initial consult, 497. And he went to one of these like borderline spiritual motivational conference things where Jesus isn’t described, but they kind of talk about metaphysical alignment and getting your woosaw, getting in your groove, alignment, no friction. And he came back and he’s like, Clay, I believe in the seventh number of completion.

I go, I agree. He says, four is the number that’s urgent. I’m like, okay. Not, and I go, what? He’s like, I don’t, I don’t want tire kickers. So I’m going to do 497 for my first consult.

That way I don’t deal with the tire kickers. And I’m like, doc, I love you so much. You’re a doctor. I love it. You don’t have any customers though. That’s why you came to me.

You don’t have any customers. So why don’t you do a first free consult?

Say, I’m not going to do it.

I’m going to kick out Sean, the tire kicker.

I’m sure you’ve never seen this with a client. Oh. Never. And so now what makes it worse is his wife also went to the Metaphysical Alignment Motivational Jackassery Festival. And she was like, 497 is the number. I had a dream about it.

I’m like, yeah, you probably talked about it all weekend. You probably are subconsciously thinking about it. You’re probably creating a neural pathway related to 497. And so anyway, after about a year, he finally says, OK, I came to your conference. And I saw a person that did the first consult for $1. I’m going to go with that.

And now his business is blowing up. Could you talk about your no -brainer, your first consult for a dollar? How has that helped you having that no -brainer offer? Yeah, so it gets people in and so when we get people in, we know that we’re doing a good job and we know that we’re trustworthy and our health care is superior to most.

So just getting people in for that dollar, because a lot of people are, you know, they’re nervous about going to the doctor or they don’t trust health care system. And so they know that they can come in, they’re only going to spend a dollar, they can figure out whether or not they trust us, figure out whether or not we’re the place for them. And we know 100 % of the time we will be.

So it’s really helped us just get people in and get people to trust us more. Now, once somebody fills out the form, folks, again, there’s a linear pathway here. I’m trying to give you a visual here. So you establish your revenue goals. You figure out your numbers to break even. You figure out how many hours a week you’re willing to work.

Even though you have a cute baby, you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to get it done.

Step number four is you define your unique value proposition. What makes you unique? That’s something you and Sean have worked on together. You improve your branding. Now you’re coming in contact with humans. Business is a contact sport.

I love this part. That’s when you start marketing. You launch your marketing. You have your online ads.

You optimize your website. to come up top in the search results, you start to get leads.

Do you remember what it was like, Jenny, when you first got your first online lead? Do you remember the first one where you’re like, it’s working! Do you remember that moment? Yeah. It was almost like we wanted to, well, we did celebrate because it finally had happened. And then as soon as the first one came in, the second one came in.

And like I said, it was, it was almost a growing pain experience. We’ve had so many leads so fast. Um, so it was great. And we still celebrate every lead that we get. Now, Mike, the next step is you have to make sales scripts. Uh, we, we, we recommend to every client that the calls are recorded for quality assurance.

You have a sales script. Calls are recorded for quality assurance. You have a one sheet that tracks your pricing. You have pre -written emails. You begin tracking. Sean’s always bragging about you guys with tracking.

Mike, how has it helped to have tracking in place where you can see?

How has that helped you?

Well, it’s really a good benefit because at the end of the week, you know what your income was. You know what your lead was. So wherever we’re lacking in, we can quickly adjust and make that adjustment to make it work for the next week. Now, if you don’t have tracking, folks, this is a true story. It’s kind of a sad story.

So I’ll speak in generality, Sean.

I talked to a guy the other day. This is a terrible story. Longtime client. And he got motivated. He set up a trade show. He didn’t tell me he was doing it.

That’s fine.

You don’t have to tell me.

But he set up a trade show.

I think he was going to try to surprise me with the fruit of the trade show. So he set up the trade show. And he gets on the call.

His energy’s kind of off.

And I’m like, are you OK? Yeah, doing fine. What’s wrong? Hi, just, you know.

I don’t know.

I’m like, your lead sheet, we’re getting, you know, 10 to 15 leads a week. It’s very consistent. Revenue looks good. He’s like, yeah, I’m in a tight spot. We are in a tight spot. We’re in a tight spot.

He says, I did a trade show. You did a trade show. Yeah, I got roped into four. I did a thing where you get the billboard, you get the trade show, you get the magazine ad.

And I did the trade show and we got no leads. And I go, what kind of trade show did you do? And he says, well, I went to the whatever trade show. And Sean, what I find is that there’s the emotional excitement about being on the billboard, being on the magazine cover. And he got called by one of these kind of scam, I call it a scammockery, or jackassery.

They call you and they go, boop, boop, boop, boop.

Hey, is this Sean? Yeah, this is Sean. Sean, yeah, we noticed that you have an incredible health care company. And we want to honor you by giving you the yada yada of the region award. It’s the yada yada, it’s a regional, it’s a prestigious award. We’d like to meet with you.

Can we meet with you? Yeah. So now I meet here. Now, Sean, again, we’re on the phone, but I still like the phone voice here. So now, Sean, so because we’re so honored, we’re inviting you to a plated dinner to honor just your honor, your honoredness, your greatness, your humbleness.

And it’s going to be $1 ,000 a plate for you and your wife. And did you want four seats or eight?

Because most people do eight.

Oh, um, I guess just four, four, four.

And that does include a glossy magazine, uh, feature in, uh, we’ll just call it like Missouri local top Dr. Jack Assery.

It’s a great magazine.

And you’re also on the, you’ll be on a billboard.

We’ve teamed up with the billboard.

It rotates through. You’re going to see her.

Hey, don’t get too excited. And just because we’re honored. We’re not, you know, again, we’re just honored now. Did you want to do the four, four tickets? Yeah, absolutely. Now the way it works is it’s going to be a four payments of 4 ,000 for a total of 16 ,000.

Uh, and that’s no, I’m serious. And now they’re in the trade shows and he’s going to the trade show and there ain’t nobody there. There is nobody there to be technical. Nobody was at this trade show. I mean, everybody was not at the trade show. He’s got photos of like him and his wife and his team in an empty booth.

And he’s got a magazine and no leads are coming. And he was so excited to tell me, um, I’m sure you’ve never encountered this sort of thing. Uh, Virginia, have you, you know, Jenny, have you ever seen a situation where that sort of sham mockery advertising has been entered into your world in some capacity? I’ve been there. I’ve been exactly where what you’re talking about. And I’ve set up everything and paid employees.

And I felt like I was nothing more than a free pin show. The only people that were there were people looking for free pins. Oh, I know. And it feels terrible. And then you kind of have to sell it to yourself all day. We’re getting our name out there.

Sean, can you pass the megaphone back there? Yeah, because I would tell people to get your name out there. What you do is you just run outside. And people go, why are you yelling at me? I’m trying to shop for my groceries. Is this effective?

Of course it’s effective.

I’m getting my name out there. That leads to buying Frisbees, branded Frisbees, Toosies. You know what I’m saying? Branded pens. Yes. All of a sudden, you buy these things.

Sean, you know what I’m talking about.

Oh, yeah. OK. So now we have to do it. I’m going to show you. This is kind of the back end of one of my companies. It’s called Elephant in the Room.

And you do a search for eitrlounge . com. And then you go to forward slash staff. I’m not going to give you the password, folks. But you log in. And these are all the systems needed to run the haircut chain.

Now, one thing I thought was very interesting is Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform, the other day they were disclosing, Newsweek was disclosing the revenue of it. And I just want people to know this because I think, and just full disclosure, I’m a very conservative person, but I just want people to see this. This is just something to look at. Truth Social, they declared in their filing that they did $3 .3 million of revenue and had $49 million of losses, which by the way, That’s very normal for a tech startup company. And their users are going up and they’re having an app. There’s like a reaction in the marketplace.

People are actually putting more money in. They’re investing. The stock price is going up.

But I don’t know anybody that I’ve met in my life.

I’ve never been a client.

that can afford to bring in 3 .3 million and lose 49 million, you know?

So like for my haircut chain, we have five locations.

We bring in more than 3 .3 million and this just in, we don’t spend 49 million, you know? So we have to, we call it a lean startup.

You got to keep that thing lean.

And so when you go to eitrlounge . com forward slash staff, every document needed to manage the business is here.

So the opening checklist for the manager, you click here, boom.

This is what the manager has to do to start the day.

Everything is documented.

And that’s kind of where we’re at right now with Jenny and Mike’s business.

We’re in the process of building all those checklists.

Yeah. Sean, what kind of checklist have you built so far? Oh, man, we have a whole page. Their staff page is pretty built out. We’re really getting there. I think more right now, it’s getting, correct me if I’m wrong, we need some managers in there so we can free you guys up from the business.

And so we have a lot of the worker level systems. We’re just now working on more of how do we get those manager level systems and find those high quality managers. Now, let me give Jenny a little mentor moment here.

This will be helpful for you.

I’m going to hop on a flight in about two and a half hours, three hours to go to Denver, right? And I got to go to Denver to meet with the founder of oxyfresh . com.

This is a brand we’ve worked with and help them to grow to 550 locations now. 550 locations. Okay. And if you type in carpet cleaning quotes, we’re the world’s highest rated and most reviewed company in the world, in the world. Okay. 274 ,000 reviews.

We’ve been holding this idea in our mind for 15 consecutive years. I’ve been working on this for Sean, before I met you, we just were grinding.

Okay. Yeah.

And the biggest challenge that the locations have is managers finding good manager. And I tell people this and it never goes over well, but hopefully eventually it will. I’ll keep refining it, refining the idea, the kind of person that enjoys conflict, but also likes peace. is a good manager. Let me try that again.

The kind of person that enjoys conflict but also likes people is a good manager.

And I have found it’s not so much trainable as it’s findable. So as an example, where we’re getting ready to head out to Denver, Sean, you know, my personality type, you know, that I have to pack all this stuff to get ready to go. You saw my suitcase out there. Yep. How many times do you think I followed up with the people involved in the trip so far before leaving? Oh man, it’s, it’s probably on your to -do list and you’ve checked it off like probably at least five times today, I would think.

And what kind of things do you think I might’ve put on my checklist to travel to Denver?

Um, first off, just making sure that the timing is working, making sure that you have all the stuff that you need, making sure that you have double of the stuff that you need in case something gets broken.

Um, making sure that the people who, who are there know you’re coming and when you’re going to be there.

Do you think I’m checking a bag? Oh, yeah.

You’re probably not checking it back.

There it is.

You’re going to get lost.

Right.

No.

And am I, am I getting, do you think I’m catching a flight a lot earlier than I need to be there?

Way earlier.

Yeah.

If I’m having a meeting tomorrow, which I am, I’m leaving today at 1230.

So this is, that’s the sort of paranoia that makes management possible.

So I have literally called.

I said, all right, I’m getting on the 1230 flight.

We’re meeting tomorrow.

I should be in by like four o ‘clock Denver time.

Our meeting’s tomorrow.

If that flight gets delayed and the next one gets delayed and the next one, I’ll still be there.

I’ve got backup phone chargers. I have a rule. Everybody going with me. You cannot check a bag. I want to check a bag. Can’t check a bag.

Why?

Because it could get lost.

This is real. I am completely paranoid. And that is the paranoia is what makes the businesses run. And I asked my staff every day, guys, elephant in the room, did you guys get a review?

And they say, yeah, we got a review. You asked me 10 minutes ago.

OK, well, I’ll talk to you in four minutes.

You hear me say that. I’ll say, I’ll talk to you in five minutes.

And I’ll do it.

And it’s a follow -up of, because I have to make sure that the checklists are being followed. the reviews are being followed. We’re a licensed business. People don’t know that. Haircare, you’re licensed by the state. So we have certain cleanliness standards.

We could have random people from the state show up. So we got checklists. And I follow up. And it doesn’t bother me to follow up with the same adult who’s in their 40s six times within a 50 -minute span of time.

It doesn’t bother me.

But most people, that bothers them.

Yeah. And so have you found that, Jenny, that a lot of people don’t like to follow up?

Have you found that?

Or is that just something unique to me? Um, I found that they don’t like to follow up. No, people don’t like to follow up. It’s a, almost like an awkward communication thing that people will try to avoid. Yeah. And it’s not necessarily that you’re being mean or any type of way, but that’s, I feel like that’s probably the way that we feel when we continuously follow up, like we’re having to step on people’s toes, but really we’re not, we’re just getting the job.

My mentorship moment for you is it’s probably the same feeling you have when you ask for reviews.

Yeah.

It’s probably the same. So, and I’m just saying, and then, and if Mike, do you ever play football or a sport of some kind? Yeah, I used to play soccer. Okay. Soccer. So like when you, what position did you play?

Uh, goalkeeper. Goalkeeper.

Okay.

So is a goal.

This is a great, great example. I didn’t know you were a goalkeeper, but when you’re a goalkeeper and someone’s kicking that ball at you fast, I mean, just the balls coming in there.

I mean, people can really kick a soccer ball fast. There are certain people that want to be a goalkeeper, but they kind of avoid the ball. They try to hide from it. They flinch. You know what I’m talking about? But you actually would lunge into it.

Am I correct? Right.

I mean, you’re aggressive, right?

I mean, you’re like you had, for some reason you enjoyed it. Yeah. Right. Getting a hundred miles an hour fastball. Did you ever see somebody who tried to be a goalie? I’m not looking for a name here, but somebody who would kind of hide from the ball.

Yeah. This is the same thing for management.

I guess the manager, you have to want, like, you have to sort of seek out conflict, but like people.

So I I’ll say things like, okay, it’s eight o ‘clock. I need to go to the bathroom. put out the flags in front of the elephant in the room store today, Mr. Manager.

Put out the flags that draw the attention by the road.

Put out the flags. And I’m going to call you in 10 minutes to follow up. Call him in 10 minutes. Are the flags up? Can you send me a picture? They’re like, do you not trust me?

Absolutely not. I trust nobody. Go ahead and send him. And then I’ll call him back 30 minutes later. Hey, did you get Google reviews? Yeah, we got one Google review.

You know, the quote is 10.

Yeah, I’ll call you back in two minutes. You know, call him back. Hey, did you get a review? It’s been two minutes. I know. Oh, hey, I’ll tell you what.

I’ll call you back in an hour. And I, my whole day is just following up. And then over time, the culture happens where people go, he’s going to follow up. And now the people that like to follow up, like to work there and it’s become a great thing. And that’s where we’re kind of at right now, I think, is we’re getting into the followup phase.

Do you have call recording in place there, Mike?

Are you, do you have the call recording for quality assurance installed yet?

Yes, we do.

And are you learning some things?

Yes. It is very hard to train people on recording screens. Yeah. That’s something we got to do. Now we’re just going through the workflow and then the wowing the customers.

What Sean is saying is that your patients are consistently wowed. No, I don’t know if that’s because Sean is your hype man or if that’s a real thing, but it seems like people are actually wowing. They’re being wowed right now. People, when they come in, this is, if you look at the workflow, they buy something right here. We have to wow them. You’ve got to create that.

wow moment. And again, if you want to download this diagram, folks, just go to thrive timeshow . com forward slash millionaire thrive timeshow . com forward slash millionaire. You can download it from my newest book called a millionaire’s guide to becoming sustainably rich.

You got to create that wow moment. I mean, amidst the checklists and the tracking at some point here, you’ve got to create a moment that wows people where they go, wow. So I’m trying to get everybody’s creative juices flowing here. So if you have a restaurant, I work with a restaurant in Florida right now, a great restaurant. They say, Welcome in. Is it your first time?

They say, yeah, it’s my first time. Oh, well, hey, you get free appetizers on us today and one free adult beverage. Welcome in. And that every time it’s. that, wow. And then when you come back later and ask for a review or, hey, what entree do you want?

Guess what? People become generous with how they buy. Another example, I work with an auto auction.

The auto auction says your first time that you buy from the auto auction, you only have to pay $1. more than the actual cost of the vehicle, just to wow people, to get that going. I happen to work with a carpet cleaning business, carpet cleaning business. And what they do is they say, hey, the first time we clean your carpet, we’ll beat any competitor’s price, and it will be at least half off of our normal price.

And they go, OK, great.

You’ve got to have that wow moment. What are you guys doing, Jenny, to wow your customers there?

Well, there are things that we do. We will oftentimes like give samples of certain things because we know they work.

We have a lot of supplement sales that we do.

Again, the dollar console is a wow moment because we will spend some you know, 10 to 15 minutes explaining how we’re different. And I feel like they’re wowed because of that. Also, our services are so much different. We spend time in the room with our patients. We listen to them. They’re not just a number.

And a lot of times, people have never experienced that. So there’s a lot of wow moments, I think, for all of our patients. I understand that 59 % of your customers are now from word of mouth. Is that accurate? Yeah.

That’s huge.

Yeah, well, and with the customer acquisitions cost, too, I’ve heard you say this before, Clay, that if you’re advertising and you’re doing a good job wowing at the same time, they compound each other.

And you’ll end up having two to three word of mouth referrals from those patients that are wowed for every one lead you have from advertising. We measured and tracked that they had this last year. For every dollar they spent on advertising, they were able to bring back in $4 .61. So that’s a 461 % return on their marketing investment. It’s incredible stuff.

And well, the great news is as we build these systems, If you guys ever wanted to franchise or license or open up multiple locations, if done properly, you should be able to scale it. It should be very repeatable. very duplicatable. Other things you guys have done, you’ve implemented a database to keep track of your customers. You’re gathering objective video reviews. You guys are really checking all the boxes.

I’d like for you, if you can, Jenny, here, to give a word of encouragement for any of our listeners out there that are a little bit on the fence right now, and they’re going, you know, I have thought about scheduling a free consultation, but I couldn’t get it done. I don’t know. I hear it’s $1 ,700 a month. Can you maybe explain your thoughts, what you’d say to anybody who’s a friend of yours or family that asks you about the value about the business consulting? Oh, well, I would say that The $1 ,700 a month is an excuse not to have someone to mentor you. It’s kind of like being in a gym when you need a trainer.

We’re not always perfect and business owning is not easy and you need a mentor.

I’ve never missed the $1 ,700 a month, even when I was only six months in when we started with you guys. I’ve never, I’ve never even considered it a loss. It was, it was scary at first to make that, but that wasn’t an excuse. I knew I needed someone. to guide me through this. And you guys have guided us through this through the entire thing, through employees, through income, through spending, through all of it.

And we come through so many problems. There are a lot of problems that are established when you have a business. I mean, you become very overwhelmed very fast and you need somebody that you can call who’s successful, who’s been there that says, you’re not crazy. This happens to all of us. Here’s what you do about it. It’s been the best decision that we’ve made.

Final question I have here for you, as far as Having a turn, like a one -stop shop. Years ago, I hired a business consultant who was great. And he would say things like, and I’m not ripping him, I’m just telling you what would happen. He would say, Clay, you got to work on your business and not in it. I’m going, that’s true. He goes, you got to delegate to elevate.

That’s true. Clay, your website is not optimized. And I’m going, this is great, fresh perspective. I go, Bruce, could you help me optimize? No, I don’t optimize.

Could you help me work on it? No. Could you help me make a checklist? No. Do you make, do you help me with the print pieces that I need to make? No.

Can you make a video? No. Do you help me with my online ads? No.

Clay, and he would used to, he was kind of an Eastern, he’s an Eastern, Northeastern American guy. And he used to say, Clay baby, let me tell you what. I don’t make print pieces. What am I, a print piece guy? I’m not a web guy. We know what I am.

I’m a work on the business guy. You got to find a good web guy. So every meeting we would have would result in me having to find another vendor to pay another $8 ,000 to build the website, $4 ,000 to make the video, $5 ,000 to do it. So every time you would give a recommendation, it would lead to another cost. Can you maybe explain the value of having a flat monthly fee?

yeah, I don’t have to ever worry about it. Like it’s, I know if I need the website updated, it’s a text away. I know if I’m having trouble with an employee, it’s a text away. I know if I have need financial advice, it’s a text away. And again, we meet every single week and all our questions are answered and we’re held accountable to what we need to be held accountable for. So it really works for us.

Jenny and Mike, thank you guys for your time so much.

I really do value your time. I appreciate you guys being here today.

And on part two of today’s show, we’re going to tee up another success story because we want people to know it is possible, despite the financial jackassery plaguing our nation right now, it is possible to become successful. And you guys are a living example of it.

Thank you guys for bringing your baby on the show.

We’ll talk to you soon.

This is Dr. Jay Schroeder, health nurse chiropractic here in Franklin, just outside of Nashville.

Just wanted to record kind of my experience with thrive over the last 16 months. I think it’s been almost 18 months with these guys They have really helped me turn my clinic around my clinics around I came to thrive in February of 17. I can say 16 months later, I don’t know where we would have been without these guys, but I know where we’re at now. Systems in place that make the practices no longer reliant on me being there for them to be successful. That was a huge goal of mine when I first talked to them.

We’re working towards our financial goals. We’ll be there probably within six months. My stress level has gone down. I’ll be going on vacation next week not worrying a bit about what’s happening with my two practices because I know the systems that we put in place is going to make them run as if I was there. I don’t know what else to say, but thank you guys. I love, I look forward to my weekly coaching calls, and it’s always something that I get out of those that I can plug in or talk to an employee.

And it’s just the 2%. You know, they talk about 2 % all the time. You gotta improve by 2%. You gotta do it all at once. But that 2 % over the last 16 to 18 months has made a huge difference for my life, my family, our practices, and again, just the stress level that we were at. compared to now has been life changing.

So thanks guys, really appreciate all you do and look forward to the next 16 to 18 months and beyond. Thanks.

I just wanted to take a minute to talk about Thrive15 and what they’ve done for me.

My experience with them started with a weekend seminar. I was just kind of feeling stuck and just needed something to light my creative juices.

A friend of mine recommended I go check them out and I did.

Certainly nothing short of amazing, just that weekend seminar as far as what it did for me. But based on that, I wanted to learn more about what they could do to help me, and there’s no doubt about that. without their help, I don’t know if I would have got where I want to go and even to the point where I am now. If you are someone who’s looking to start a business or expand your current business, I highly recommend you give these guys a look as they will help you. at least give you an idea of what it’s going to take to get you from where you are now to where you want to go in the future. I’m a guy with big vision, and I just didn’t quite know how to get from point A to point B, and they’re certainly helping me get to that point down the road.

If you look at this board behind you, this is all stuff that they’ve made me think about, if you will. So yeah, give them a look. I think it’ll be well worth your time.

Time that I ever met you, Clay, was at that first conference in Tulsa. And that was an incredible conference. And I was so impressed with just the whole thing, just the professionalism, you as a person, your business, your work ethic, and really just who you are. And I was very impressed with all of that. And I thought, gosh, this might be someone that I would really consider working with. Maybe he could really help me.

And that’s really what got me interested because I was so impressed with just the professionalism of all of it. And I learned a lot. I come about once a year to a business conference and I’d like to come more, but every year I try to come with my marketing girl with me and we always learn something. We always learn something. And I’m, I think next year I’m going to bring my husband because he really needs to come too. OK, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, I wanted to share with you a story about a good person who is growing a good business by treating their customers the way they want to be treated.

She’s a longtime client. We’re honored to have her. her and help her grow her business. And I want you to hear a great success story. So that being said, Dr. Stephanie, welcome on to The Thrive Time Show.

How are you? Hi, I’m doing great. Thank you so much, Clay. Well, first off, I’m going to pull up your website. So tell all the listeners, what’s the name of your website so we can verify that you are, in fact, a real orthodontist? OK, my website is smileshollywood .

com. OK, smileshollywood .

com. Yes. I’m going to pull this up real quick here. And as I pull this up, I’m going to ask you a little bit about your background, because you’re doing really well. You’re based in McKinney, Texas. When did you have that vision to become an orthodontist?

Like, what age were you where you thought, you know what? I want to become an orthodontist? Well, that had to have been when I was visiting my own orthodontist. Dr. Jim Boley, who’s retired now, but was an awesome, great orthodontist, and one of the greats, really. But what’s funny is, is that I actually wanted to be a medical doctor first. And I used to go into his office and he’d say, Stephanie, you don’t want to be a medical doctor.

You want to be an orthodontist. And I said, no, I don’t, Dr. Boley. Why are you saying that?

And he started telling me all of the great things about dentistry and why It’s so great because you don’t have to deal with people dying on you. You don’t have to deal with sick people. You get to make people look amazing and beautiful by straightening their teeth, and you leave with happy patients. And you know, he talked me into it, and I thought, that sounds like a great job. So that’s really how I became an orthodontist. And you’re in McKinney, Texas, right?

So how long have you been an orthodontist in McKinney, Texas? So I’ve been an orthodontist for 26 years, practicing in McKinney. And when you went to medical school, what percentage of the time in medical school or dentistry school, dental school, did they spend teaching you how to model? and or grow your own practice? Absolutely zero, zero marketing skills. OK, OK.

And so one of the great things that I love about working with you is we get to help you grow your business, but you get to be more of who you are. I mean, you get to help more patients and help more people create great smiles. And then we get to do some of the nitty gritty stuff that maybe isn’t your highest and best use. And so I want to focus on some of the things we’ve been able to accomplish together over these few years here. First off, from a branding perspective, I really do feel like your website is first class. And from when I talked to Andrew, the coach who works with you, I’m always hearing that more and more patients are coming in from Google.

Could you talk about that? How much of an impact does it have having maybe a rebranded or updated website and Google leads coming in? It has had a huge difference, absolutely huge difference in our patient load coming in. And before, I really wasn’t tracking really well.

And that’s one of the things I learned from Thrive Time Business was how to track patients coming in, how to really, how to see where they’re coming from. And at the time, I really didn’t know much about Google and, you know, being an orthodontist for 26 years, I didn’t really know a lot of, I kind of went through a time where I went through shock. It was really what I call culture shock because the old ways of marketing were not working anymore.

And because I really didn’t know about online marketing, I really didn’t, I was still doing, you know, phone book ads and magazine ads and all of these things. And so, Thrive Time has really helped. I started out with 97 reviews. Now we have almost 600 reviews.

And, you know, it takes a long time to get those reviews and you have to really work diligently. And, you know, Andrew was amazing, my coach. he’s fantastic. Really, really had to prod me sometimes because, you know, sometimes I was like an old mule and just stuck my feet in and said, no, I don’t want to do that. And he said, trust me, it works. And I just kept going and he kept pushing.

And I tell you what, it’s really working. We’re getting a lot of patients from Google and it’s fantastic. Now, as far as gathering patients from the Google search results, there’s a couple of things that have to happen. I mean, one, you’ve got to have the most content. There’s four variables. One, you have to have the most original HTML content or text.

Second, you have to have the most objective reviews from real customers. Third, your website has to be in constant mobile compliance, where we’re updating the website to meet the current updated guidelines of the ever -evolving internet. And then we’ve got to make sure your website is canonically compliant, where it basically follows all Google Google’s rules. How much has that helped your peace of mind knowing that you have a team that’s helping you update your website every month and that you don’t have to do that? It is a huge relief, an absolute huge relief, because I know that these things are being done. The SEO is being done properly.

The backwriting under the website is being done properly and increasing. And we’re relevant every single day. We’re relevant because I know these things are happening. And before I actually was trying to do some of these things on my own. And, you know, I’m not the best writer. And then I realized why am I doing this myself?

Because honestly, I don’t have the time. And so it’s really a great relief to know that these things are being done and that they’re working.

And I saw when I first started with Thrive Time, I was probably 11 or 12.

I was working with an SEO company at the time. And I was probably coming up 11 or 12, which is really the second page when somebody brings you up on the computer. But now I’m, you know, I’m at two, I’m at three, I’m at four, depending on the keywords. so I couldn’t be more happy. And you know, again, if we do a search for orthodontist in McKinney, Texas, we can find you right there in the top three. Also, after you move past the three pack or the top three there, we can also find your site in the search results.

And again, it’s not a result of luck. It’s not a result of some sort of woo -woo plan. It’s specific, actionable processes. The next thing I want to talk about is just overall lead tracking and Dream 100 marketing. I think a lot of times people Not you, but other people, entrepreneurs, none of our listeners. We might market based on feel.

So if we feel like we’re not getting enough leads, we might feel the need to go market.

And if we feel like we’re overwhelmed with leads, we might feel the need to not market. But one of the things that we try to teach to our wonderful clients, like yourself, is the importance of implementing a consistent and implementable plan, a consistent and practical plan. Could you talk about the importance of tracking your leads and then also just consistently doing those marketing systems, like the Dream 100, that do produce fruit? So the Dream 100 has really been a great addition. We were doing something similar to that, but really not with the concerted effort and doing it on a regular basis. We were kind of doing it a little more haphazardly.

And I really have noticed a difference because when you are visiting dentist’s office and you’re developing a relationship with them and they are seeing you on a regular basis every week or every two weeks, they, you know, the staff starts to remember you. And so, you know, you never know a patient may come in tomorrow, and you just drop by their office with a goodie today, you know, and, and then they are going to think of you whenever it’s time to, to refer for an orthodontist. And that that’s really made a big, big change in our practice, too.

And we track every single one of those.

So we know how many Dr. X sent over and we know how many Dr. Y sent over. So we know our top referrers and we know the ones that we need to kind of get to know better and help them send to us too. There’s somebody watching this right now who’s a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, and they’re going, I don’t know if the Dream 100 works. What do you say to that person who’s sitting down with you right now? And they go, yeah, I just don’t know if that works.

I say it definitely works and you definitely do have to get out and meet the dentist yourself at least one time even if you just some of the some of the dentists I couldn’t actually just go meet you know to have lunch they didn’t have lunches so I just actually went by the office myself I took a little goodie with me you know a muffin or something and I’d go by maybe right before lunch and just introduce myself. And then when my, when my gal would come by every week or every other week to deliver things to their office, they at least knew who I was. I had introduced myself and we, we found that we started getting patients that way. So it definitely helps. Now, next thing I want to talk about is hiring. And I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like this.

I’m sure you haven’t.

It’s probably just me. But whenever you have a garden that you plant, I’ll pull up a picture of a garden so we can all picture it in our minds. Whenever you plant a garden, there’s probably some initial excitement. You go, you know what? I’m going to plant these tomatoes. I’m going to do it.

I’m going to get after it. This is my year. I’m going to get the garden going.

I’m excited. I’m going organic. Let’s go. Well, what happens is over time, people stop pulling the weeds. They stop tending to the garden. And over time, the garden becomes like an overgrown monster garden.

The garden starts to become something that looks like a mistake, something that looks like an uh -oh, something where your neighbors say, are you going to mow that thing? And it gets bad. And the same thing is true with employees. If you have a team of people that work for you, your payroll and you’re a business owner, it turns out that the average American today, for whatever reason, and I’m going to pull some stats here so people don’t think I’m crazy, the US Chamber reports that 75 % of employees steal from the workplace.

What? That’s the US Chamber reporting that 75 % of employees steal from the workplace. And you might say, really? Yeah. And 85 % of employees, 85 % of employees lie on resumes, meaning that they just make up some statistic on there, and they throw it on their resumes. And 85 % of employees are, again, are lying on their resumes.

I’m pulling this up here, folks. But there are There’s a certain group of employees that they just lie on their resumes. Called 85 % of job applicants lie on their resumes. And 75 % of employees steal from the workplace. So in your business, you have a great staff, and you want to keep it that way. So you can’t hire the thieves.

You can’t hire people that lie on their resumes. So that 85 % of the population that lies on their resumes, they can’t work for you. And that 75 % of the population that steals from the workplace, they can’t work for you either because you want to wow your customers. Can you talk about embracing the processes that we teach of the ongoing hiring processes and just always recruiting new people? Absolutely. So we have taken on really the task of making sure that we have every single day and at any one time, there is going to be an ad out there for any position in our office.

And, you know, occasionally we’ll have somebody come in and we’ll have them, you know, just do a little affidavit or something. And what’s really interesting is that even my employees, even when I’m not, I’m not needing someone, my employees will be like, are we having somebody come in, do a working interview?

You know, and everybody gets really nervous, but it actually also helps them get on their best behavior again. So but it’s like if you always have someone waiting in the wings, then should you have someone that drops off? Maybe their husband gets transferred and they’re a wonderful employee, but it’s just now they have to move. And now you’ve got someone that you can hire. Or if you have someone that’s like what happened in my office where, you know, it was a inventory day and doctors weren’t there and she decided to go work out and hang out with her boyfriend for five hours and then forgot to clock out, you know, so that’s called stealing.

Yeah.

And I. And recently, and these are just real examples I’m sharing with people, I’ve had some of my really, really nice employees, two of them decided to have a baby and start a family. And so I’m not going to hold an employee hostage. I’m not mad that they decided to move on. But you get to a place where if you’re not careful, folks, you’re going to find yourself in a kind of a defensive posture where you’re not going to be able to cover the appointments, the obligations, the customers that are reaching out to you. So if you’re out there today, hiring has got to be a priority. process and not an event.

So again, just recapping, the branding, the marketing, the search engine optimization, the hiring, the tracking. I want to talk about retargeting ads. Retargeting ads, whenever somebody goes to your website, We’ve got to have ads that follow people around the internet. So that way, people constantly see Smiles Hollywood, Smiles Hollywood, Smiles Hollywood. And that creates top of mind awareness. Can you talk about how important it is for you to know that you have a team of people thinking about those kind of things so, again, you don’t have to?

Absolutely. And I think just being a Thrivetime customer really makes you feel like you’re taken care of in so many different areas. Because I didn’t even know what those ads were when I when I first became a client. I didn’t even know.

I remember thinking, I wonder how you get to have an ad when you’re when you’re going to your bank account. And then all of a sudden, this thing pops up, you know, for some brand of sunglasses that you were just looking at, I thought, how do you get those ads? You know, how do you even find out about them.

And so these are the ads that you guys fix this up with. And they’re fantastic. And I do know that they do bring in patients. Now, coaching is an ongoing process. Every week, Andrew meets with you.

Every week, and this might sound shocking for folks out there, but every single morning, our coaches have to meet with me at six in the morning. And I ask them every morning, I say, How’s your client doing?

And I go over all 160 clients.

It’s a real thing. I go over 40 clients every single day. I go over the checklist of all 40 clients every day. And we do that every single morning. So every week, we review the files of all 160 clients to make sure you guys are thriving, you’re growing, you’re not backsliding, everyone’s doing well. Could you talk about the importance of having somebody who, A, helps you track, but also kind of pushes you to be your best?

Well, that has been a lifesaver because honestly, well, I kind of learned it on myself because Andrew was good about pushing me and he would say, okay, well, did you meet with your staff about this or that? And I said, oh yeah, I didn’t quite do that. And so he was really good about reminding me that I needed to meet with my staff once a week or once a day, whatever it was, depending on the item. But I found like, for instance, with my front desk girl, She was fantastic, but she was supposed to be following up on leads. She was supposed to have a lead list. And so every week I would call her and say, Hey, how’s that lead list?

And I would actually have Andrew on the phone with me and she, and we would talk and she, she kind of would say, oh yeah, yeah, they’re good. And, you know, and then finally, I think she got it. She realized I need a list. And so I think she realized Dr. Christ is going to ask me every week and I better get organized here. And so she actually did. came up with her own lead list in her own little system, which was fantastic, by the way, and has helped us tremendously at the front desk.

And anytime we go over the lead list, because I have several, I have about three employees that have lead lists, different kinds of lead lists, and she is fantastic. I never have to worry about her lead list. The other two, I have to check theirs.

And that’s the thing, is I think you start to really hold your employees accountable.

Andrew helps hold me accountable and make sure that I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing. Because let’s face it, life gets busy, you know, and I mean, I’m a mom and I’m a wife and have all kinds of other things going on too. And so I want to have a thriving business, but you have to, you have to put the work into your business. And it’s nice to have someone there prodding me along when I get lazy. Now, you’re one of these wonderful folks where most of our clients, they actually come to the workshops. They also do coaching.

And so you’re somebody who’s been to the conferences. You do the weekly coaching.

You’ve seen the whole experience.

I guess some people describe our coaching system as life -changing or they focus on the numbers. How would you describe how the one -on -one coaching in conjunction with the conferences has impacted maybe you and or your business? Well, the first time that I ever met you, Clay, was at that first conference in Tulsa. And that was an incredible conference. And I was so impressed with just the whole thing, just the professionalism, you as a person, your business, your work ethic, and really just who you are. And I was very impressed with all of that.

And I thought, gosh, this might be someone that I would really consider working with. Maybe he could really help me. And that’s really what got me interested, because I was so impressed with just the professionalism of all of it. And I learned a lot. I come about once a year to a business conference, and I’d like to come back. but every year I try to come with my marketing girl with me.

And we always learn something. We always learn something. And I’m, I think next year I’m going to bring my husband because he really needs to come too. And he’s been, he’s been going along with this with me and he’s thinking, wow, this is really working for you. Maybe I need to come. So we’ve loved it.

So if somebody is watching right now, they’re on the website, they go to Thrivetimeshow . com, they’re thinking about scheduling a free consultation, or they’re thinking about coming to a workshop. What do you say to somebody out there that’s on the fence, thinking about coming to a conference and or scheduling a free 13 point assessment? Well, I say absolutely do it. Absolutely do it. And I will say that it’s a process.

It doesn’t happen overnight. But if you stay the course, you’re going to see results, because I’m absolutely convinced. Dr. Christ, thank you for allowing us to take up some of your valuable time today. I really do appreciate you, and I can’t wait to see you in person here soon. Thanks so much, Clay. Ladies and gentlemen, a lot of people talk about having success.

A lot of people want to have success. But there is a proven path to achieve success. And about four years ago, I had the opportunity to connect with somebody by the name of Dr. Mark Sherwood. My good friend Aaron Antis swore by the results of Dr. Sherwood. My good friend Pastor Craig Hagan swore by the results of Dr. Sherwood. And we had a chance to team up.

And it’s been an honor to team up with his practice and to help him grow his medical practice. And if you’re out there today and you want to grow your business, on today’s show, we’re going to talk about growing your business and what happens when you diligently implement a proven plan. And here to talk about it is Dr. Sherwood. Welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Yeah, I’m doing well, Clay.

Thanks for having me. And it has been an honor, hasn’t it? What a ride and what a journey it’s been. Now, without getting into the specific financial numbers, you and I were talking offline. And I believe, since you and I first talked on the phone today, I believe you’re about seven times larger. Is that an accurate number?

Am I getting that number wrong in some capacity?

No, it’s at least seven, closer to eight.

Yeah.

And that’s so many people talk about growing their business by 2 % or 5 % or 12%. I want to give people some real facts here. We’re going to go here to Inc. I’m going to do a search right now on Google. I want everyone to do it with me. Assume I’m making this up. Inc.

Magazine reports that 96 % of businesses fail. That’s according to Inc Magazine. That’s not clayclark . com. 96%. Now, if you go to usdebtclock .

com, which is, by the way, a great way to get depressed. If you go to usdebtclock . org, you’ll see that in America today, we only have 9 million, 9 .3 million self -employed people in a country of 336 million. So if even 10 % of our country was self -employed, that would be 36 million self -employed people. But we only have 9 million self -employed people. So we’re talking about, it’s like less than 3 % of our population is even self -employed to begin with.

And so if less than 3 % of our population is self -employed, And 96 % of businesses fail. By default, folks, you’ve got, you know, I mean, it’s a very, very small percentage chance of being successful by default. And so what I want to focus on is implementing a proven path and a proven system. So step number one, since you and I have connected, I didn’t teach this to you, but you do it. You diligently implement a plan. Can you talk about that?

Because every week, you and I, we connect. Every week, you know, in this case, There’s a plan that you do, and I won’t get into all the details, but you do it every single week. You do it in the gym. You do it in your business. Talk about implementing a proven routine every day. Well, I think the end of the story of a routine is it produces predictability.

And so I look at it like this. Good habits done consistently over time provides reliability, which gives you consistency, which gives you faithfulness, which gives you trust. Now, trust is a big deal. Does that trust mean you trust yourself? I hope so. Does it trust mean that your customers or clientele trust you?

They do because it’s predictable. The thing that people can’t stand, Clay, is unpredictability or chaos or just anxiety that’s driven in businesses. So we facilitate that culture from the top down, the bottom up. And as you mentioned, every day I get up and I’m very routine. And so are you. You know, we started working together.

I remember you telling me, you get up at three o ‘clock in the morning, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I probably wake up about an hour after you, boom, boom, boom. But it’s very predictable. People know where we are, what we’re going to do, what we’re about, and it creates an expectation. And I think that, among other things, has been a key element to experiencing the 800 % growth we’ve had, which is, to me, it wasn’t that hard because it’s a process that works. Now, next question I want to ask you is, Focus on what you need to do, but then say no to the things you don’t need to do.

Again, you have to say no to grow. So yes, you’re diligent and you’re consistent, but you’re also saying no to grow. And now there are billboards, there are magazines, there are yellow pages. Yes, there are still a few yellow pages. There are billboards, there’s magazines, there’s local cable TV. There are so many different ways that you could be marketing your business, but you’ve had to say no to grow.

You’ve had to focus on, and you and your wife, you guys do books, you do documentaries, you do podcast interviews. You have a proven path, a proven trajectory that you’re on, but you do have to say no to grow. And sometimes you have to say no to good things in order to say yes to great things. Can you talk about the importance of saying no to grow? Yeah. job, what we do, you know, which is a kind of a wellness based optimization of health practice.

Right. So the bottom line is I run everything through that filter. And our filter is, does it bring healing to the person? Does it bring betterment to the person? And there’s all kinds of procedures, gizmos, gadgets and whatnot that I hear that we can get involved in. But I always look at it from this standpoint.

It’s got to run through that filter and it’s got to pass the test. Is it going to take us more time? Is it going to take us more labor? What’s the expense of it going to be originally? And what’s it going to take for us to recoup the expense, if any? And so I run into that filter every single time.

And if it doesn’t hash out, it may be a good thing, but it’s not a good thing for us. And people don’t understand that. But sometimes the greatest answer is no, because it’s a no that protects you from getting hurt. And you mentioned all that advertising mess out there. Clay, we’ve been approached by, as you know, many, many people to advertise in all kinds of markets. But if you don’t know what kind of person that you’re after, what is your target demographic, then you can’t just throw spitballs out there at the different sources, because you will waste your time and money.

And again, in that area, advertising, know to grow is critical. Now, the next area I want to focus on is having a linear workflow, or a mapped out workflow, or a written down process. So many business owners don’t know a written down process. So let me just give people an example. I’m going to go up to my website, then I’ll go to your website so people can see this.

Very predictable. If people go to thrive timeshow . com, which by the way, folks, we have about five to 10 people a day that often reach out looking for help growing their company. Now, I only take on 160 clients. That’s not a spiritual number. That’s not a reason.

I don’t do that for any spiritual reason. It’s just I have found that with my team, I like to not have more than 160 clients so that I can meet all my clients. And those clients, they schedule a free consultation. And in order to do that, I have a kind of a call screener that sets up an appointment. They hop on the phone. They find out if they’re a good fit for a free consultation.

Then my team books the free consultation for me. And because our average client is with us for six years or longer, if you do the math, we have an opening for a new client about every month or so. So if you look at TWA photos, this is one of my longtime clients based in Chicago. Him, and we’re going to hear his success story on part two of today’s show. He reached out. He filled out the form.

A member of my team called Tim to see if he was a good fit.

I then coached Tim on the first call, found out he’s a good fit, did my assessment, found out he’s a good fit, coached him through what we’re going to do, laid out the proven plan. True story, and you’re going to hear it on part two of today’s show.

Tim went on to build a very, very successful company, and he sold his business. Well, when he sold his business for a big time exit, guess what that did? That created an opening for another client. And so the process we have over and over and over is you go to thrifttimeshow . com, you can schedule a free consultation. My call screener vets that person to see if they’re a good fit.

If they are a good fit, they do an onboarding with myself. Also, we have conference tickets. We do a conference every two months. And I’ve been doing this since 2005. So since 2005, I’ve been essentially doing the same process over and over and over.

That’s why when you click on Testimonials, you will literally see thousands of client success stories, just thousands, not 100, not 50, but thousands. So I want to see if you can walk us through, what does the workflow look like when people go to Sherwood . tv? What does that workflow look like? It’s fascinating. And again, You know, you and I just kind of hit it off because we think the same way.

So we have, you know, we have an opportunity people visit our website and we get, you know, hundreds of visitors every day. And people can fill out a little questionnaire. It’s like a health assessment question. It’s free. And they get put through a series of, you know, funnel emails to sort of qualify what they want to do. And it sort of kind of vets them at the outset.

But if they want to work with us, just like yourself, we have a free webinar that they can go to. At that point after attending the webinar, Clay, they then had the opportunity at that point to schedule a one -on -one assessment intake appointment with my wife and myself. At that appointment, we determine whether or not they’re a good fit. If they’re a good fit, We develop a plan for those and execute the same plan with the same full minutes. We’re personalized for their, their lives, much like you personalize that plan with the same general processes for that business. We personalized that plan of the same general processes for their life.

Now, when people work with me, with my business, and I’m not a medical business, I have a proven process and a proven system. And so when people go. And they go to thrivetimeshow . com and they look at the different success stories. We have companies like oxyfresh . com.

We’ve helped them to grow now to 570 locations, 570. And I could go on just listing examples all day. We take companies like Shaw Homes, helped them grow from 15 million to $150 million of revenue. And we just have so many. success stories. It truly is epic.

And that’s why my parent company is called Make Your Life Epic. That is what we do, Make Your Life Epic. Dr. Sherwood, I would say what he does is very analogous to what we do for business. He does for your body. And so again, I believe what he does, Dr. Sherwood, Sherwood . TV, what he does for your body is very analogous to what we do for business.

We guide people down a proven path. And we actually tell people before they decide to become a client what the path is. We tell people, this is what we’re going to do to get you from where you are to where you want to be. Now, I know a lot of people, I would say specifically three people that I see on a weekly basis. who have lost over 40 pounds since going to Sherwood . tv.

So three people that I see on a weekly basis have lost over 40 pounds as a result of going to Sherwood . tv, learning about the protocols you offer, and then following those. You tell people in advance what the protocol is going to be. That’s very different from a lot of other medical programs that kind of hide the program or the protocol from the potential customer, from the potential patient, they hide it and they say, once you sign up, then we’ll teach you the protocol. Why are you so transparent with teaching people what your protocol is going to be before they become a patient? I think it produces trustworthiness, Clay, because a lot of times with what we do, transparency is key because my wife and I do it too.

And I, again, I’m not knocking anybody else. I just know that what you just said is very true. It is analogous. to you making someone’s company greater. I want to see their lives get greater. I want to optimize their health, give them the biological aging process of speed that’s optimal so they’re not aging too fast.

And so we live it out, we do it, and then it’s no secret. man, there are some processes that work. And I tell them, you know, if you’re willing to do this, this will work. And they see us doing it every day. We don’t hide our lives and we don’t shield them. We don’t do something, tell them to do something we’re not doing ourselves.

So I think it’s exactly as you said. And to your point, we deal with a lot of entrepreneurs that have worked with you and do work with you. So the interesting overlap is cool. I can think of a couple of people that we’ve worked with that also have are your clients in their business, and I’ve watched their businesses explode as their personal lives explode. So the synergy there is just astounding to me as I think about that. Now, I want to walk people through this again here, folks.

Again, we’re trying to walk you through that. How is it that a doctor, a medical provider, a health facility is able to grow their revenue by eight times within a period of just a few years. How is that possible when 96 % of businesses are failing? One is you have to have a proven plan. Two, you have to implement that plan each and every week. And three, you have to measure what you treasure.

You just have to measure what you treasure. You have to track or it’s going to slack. And that’s true with health, and it’s true with wealth. You have to track or it’s going to slack. And so any area of our lives, if you’re listening right now, you talk about your faith, your family, your finance, your fitness, your friendship, your fun, any area where we are not achieving at our optimal performance, it’s probably because we’re not measuring what we’re treasuring. It’s probably we’re not focusing on it.

And again, I’m not attacking anybody out there. There’s somebody out there listening right now. You are in phenomenal physical shape, and financially, you’re not in shape. There’s somebody else out there listening. You’re in great financial shape. You’re in great physical shape, but your family’s not in great shape.

Somebody else out there, you say you got your family, you got your faith, you got your fitness, you got your friendship. but you’re really, really in a bad spot in another area. So whatever we measure is what we treasure. Talk about that for a second, because you have a way of helping your patients and your clients to measure what they treasure and to track. And I see people all the time coming into my office, being excited they’ve lost four pounds, they lost six pounds, they lost nine pounds, they lost 20. They lost 21 pounds.

They lost 27 pounds. They lost 30. They lost 40. And you see people gaining confidence every week as they begin to take this massive goal they have, and they start to see success day after day. Talk about measuring what you treasure. Yeah, one thing I forgot to add, too, in the process, we have quarterly events.

I mean, and I didn’t have those things, too, which are kind of cool. That’s kind of a culmination of stuff that people can celebrate. But when we talk about measurables, We talk about this all the time, physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, financial, the five parts of a human experience. I talk to them, I don’t get into heavy dealing with their debt though, but I talk to them about eliminating debt and building equity, but I use that same terminology within health. I don’t want wellness debt, I want wellness equity. In other words, if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.

I never do a test unless I know what I’m asking, what questions I’m trying to get answered, and why I’m measuring it. I don’t do that. You mentioned weight loss. We have a unique way to measure that, not just about what the scale says, but I’m measuring their body composition, Clay. I’m measuring their percent body fat. I wanna know how much muscle they’ve maintained or grown and how much fat they’ve been able to lose.

I wanna know their visceral fat level. I wanna know their blood pressure. I wanna know all their scores that I can find We’ve even got tests that can score their biological aging processes and speeds and actualities. It quantifies that into measurable components and so we’re actually developing right now. and I haven’t got it rolled out yet, a quotient we’re going to call the FMI age, you know, and it’s going to be a little massive thing that we’re going to put together. Because, you know, I think people are aging in a way that is probably too fast, you know, and I think we can probably age better.

But to your point, I concur 1000%. If you can’t measure it, and it’s not quantifiable, don’t do it.

Because then it becomes a distraction.

Now, I want to tap into your wisdom on this, let you kind of show off what you do a little bit here. One of my wonderful clients is called Koloff Fitness. Koloff Fitness.

And Charles Koloff started out doing personal training.

He started out doing personal training. And on part two of today’s show, folks, you’re going to hear his success story, too. So you’re going to hear the success story of TWA Photos. You’re going to hear the success story of Koloff Fitness.

He started out doing personal training.

And then he decided, you know what? I want to open up a gym. And then he said, you know what? I want to open up a second gym. And that’s where we met him is as he was scaling the business. And so what he does when people want to lose weight, I’ll tell you his secret.

He tells them, here’s the deal. I need you to not eat wheat, no sweets, and no alcohol.

And people are like, what?

He’s like, no wheat, no sweets, no alcohol.

We’ll see you three days a week working out. And he starts that process. He starts small. No wheat, no sweets, no alcohol, three days a week working out. And over time, they start to add maybe more detail to it, more supplementation, more detail, maybe more vigorousness to it. But they start off with no wheat, no sweets, no alcohol, three days a week working out.

Um, and then they start to build on that foundation. I want to get your, your, your, just for anybody out there that’s thinking about becoming a Sherwood . tv patient or client, and they’re, they’re maybe concerned about what’s going to be required of them. What sort of life changes need to be made in the lives of people that, you know, are thinking about implementing the Sherwood path? And I know there’s a lot of details, a lot of research that you do into each and every patient, but what are a couple of practical steps that every single one of your patients has to implement right away?

Well, I appreciate, you know, I know Charles is one of my great people, by the way, and I concur with what he said. That’s a great start for anybody, right? So at least take that.

I think for us, our advice would be simply put, if it’s real food, eat it, don’t diet. If it’s in the original package, it’s fine. If you can imagine it being in that package in the Garden of Eden, it’s fine. So I tell people typically to stay away. It’s going to sound crazy. Anything the government subsidizes, don’t do it.

That’s kind of what I tell them with food and people can go, oh yeah, I get that because the government subsidizes wheat, corn, soy, dairy, and that kind of mess, you know. So I tell them stay away from that. Then I tell them that every day I want you to try to get, you know, somewhere between about seven hours, give or take, is probably if you can get that much. And then I tell them every day that you don’t move is a day you’re dead. So I want them to move more, sit less. The days you don’t move, are the day that you’re going to be in the rigor mortis.

So I make sure I tell them that. And then I want them to have the last little bit. Speak life over self, man. Don’t speak death over self. Because many times people can walk themselves into a process of oblivion by talking themselves into death every day saying they can’t do it. Now, for anybody out there that hasn’t worked with us, I mean, you and I have had the opportunity to work together faithfully each and every week now for years.

What would you say the impact has been on your business, working with us, you and I working together, for anybody out there who’s maybe thinking about working with us or becoming a client of ours? Well, without question, people need guidance today, Clay. It’s like a ship without a rudder. You represent the rudder. You can teach them how to drive, but you also shift that boat in the right direction. And I would recommend people do connect with you because you will do a good job, it will be consistent, it will be predictable.

And if people just copy these habits, no matter what business you’re in, you can adapt them to the business, the habits work, and you will see a good return on an investment. And it will exponentially grow. And then the last thing I’ll say with that, when you connect with Clay Clark, You need to set your bar high. He will not let you set that bar low because he’s going to stretch you, he’s going to push you, and he’s going to get the, on a set like this, he will pull the potential out of you and get you believing again in a good way. So, highly recommend it.

Working with you has been an honor. It’s a true win -win. For anybody out there that’s looking for health optimization, check it out at Sherwood .

tv. Sherwood . tv. And again, what you do is so analogous for health to what we do for wealth.

And so for anybody out there, if you’re looking to optimize your health, check out Sherwood .

tv.

Sherwood .

tv.

Dr. Sherwood, thank you so much. And again, for anybody out there that doesn’t know the story here, which should be everybody, you and I were just talking offline the other day. And you were saying, hey, you know, Clay, I just wanted you to know, since you and I first connected, we’re up eight times. And I just thought, well, man, there’s so much discouragement in the world we live in. We need to document this and get this on camera. So thank you for keeping us updated, sir.

And I can’t wait to have you on the show next week.

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me, as always. Closing, potentially franchising, growing that business and actually working on it and not as much in it.

Goodness, it’s gonna take me a little bit of time to process everything I brought in over the last two days.

But there’s definitely some things I need to go back and implement immediately.

Some with key players, some of our processes systems, some scripting.

We’ve been using scripting. I think we can improve on it. And that’s definitely one of the first things we’ll do because We’re seeing the patients coming in on a real regular basis, and I think we can capture more of those patients with even a small tweak of some of our scripts.

Coming to the workshop today has definitely been helpful in adding to and giving the big picture, the 10 ,000 foot view.

So I would recommend everyone who’s been working with one of the coaches that’s part of Thrive 15 to definitely attend one of the workshops.

You network with other business owners, you learn from other people’s questions. If you’re just considering being a part of one of these coaching teams, this is a great place to start. You’ll get that 10 ,000 foot view and then you can work individually with a team of coaches to really hone it in and give you those action steps to move forward. So definitely, if you’re on the fence, come, be a part of it.

Welcome to Tulsa on behalf of me. questions, America’s number one business coach has answers. It’s your broda from Minnesota.

Here’s another edition of Ask Clay Anything on the Thrive Time Business Coach Radio Show.

Back to another special edition of Ask Me Anything here on the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we’re answering the question that has been emailed a lot lately.

People say, hey, hey, hey, I have heard from a friend of mine that you

their company grow. Or I’ve seen a testimonial online about how you’ve helped a company grow. I’ve heard on social media how you’ve helped a company grow.

I know your program is month to month.

I know there’s no contract.

I get it. But I would like to know, what actually do you do for your clients?

What do you guys actually do? How do you actually help them have wins or successes? Or what kind of things do you do? What kind of strategic help? What kind of accountability?

What kind of deliverables? What kind of back -end support?

What do you do to help your clients?

And so I thought what we would do is invite one of my friends and one of our clients, Dr. Breck, onto the show. Doctor, it’s D -R -B -R -E -C -K dot com, if you want to look him up here.

D -R -B -R -E -C -K dot com. Dr. Breck.

And Dr. Breck Kaspbaum is a chiropractor who has had major success in the past year.

And the guy has been in business for over 15 years, but he’s been able to double his business in just the past 12 months. So how did he do it? What did we do to help him?

All of these things will be answered on today’s show as I interview Dr. Breck about his experience with actual one -on -one business coaching and how we’ve been able to help him double the size of his business in just the past 12 months.

Now, Dr. Brecht, talk to me about what kind of changes have you made and how has it impacted your overall profitability or growth?

Well, I’m happy to report that, you know, December of 2018, we had our highest grossing month.

So I’m super excited about that.

Ever?

Ever. Whoa, that deserves, you know what that deserves? That’s a win of the week.

Dr. Brecht celebrating a sales record here.

A new year, a new you. How is it possible? He’s a diligent doer. So what kind of practical changes have you made?

Oh, man.

Well, we had to look at our price structure. So, you know, we have to have to be honest with the value and what it costs to deliver services.

And we can’t continue to give away services.

you know, for free or losing money on them.

And so that was one of the big steps.

We also had to get rid of toxic employees or even contractors. In our case, the massage therapist, our self -employed contractors. Little warning about therapists, by the way. The only difference between the rapist and a therapist is a space. Just think about it. Okay, back to you.

That reminds me of Sean Connery on Saturday Night Live. So other changes you’ve made this year, what other changes you’ve made? I was non -existent on our SEO. I mean I literally was non -existent.

I mean you may have found me, if you put my name in exactly, spelled correctly, you might have found me on like 20 pages back.

Got it, but now you got all the content, all the tags, all the Google reviews. So that all started from scratch and we now have like 257 reviews and we’re climbing the Google search engine each day.

I was doing a search for you, was it yesterday?

And I think you were over 250, let me pull it up real quick. 257, you’re right, 257 Google reviews. And so are you having people that are finding you online now? Yes. And that’s a nice new thing. You know, people come in and like, hey, I saw your reviews.

Are you up 10 % more than last year? 20 %? What percentage are you up now?

We’re up.

So it fluctuates a little bit. But I mean, literally from like a year and a half ago to to now. We’re up double. Double. Yeah. Now have you have you fixed yours?

Have you changed or improved your sales scripting or your sales processes? all? We have, yeah. We very intensely went over a lot of scripting and things. But then also, we do have a no -brainer offer. And so the conversion aspect of that to go from, hey, this is all free to, I do expect you to pay me at some point.

Getting a better conversion script for me to work from has also been very helpful. And then you, from an HR perspective, hiring people, I’m not going to put words in your mouth, but most people, most clients we’ve worked with, most doctors we work with before business owners, before they come into our program, have a hard time finding good people. And then after they’re in the program, that’s usually not a problem anymore. Right. Is that the case with you? Are you doing good on finding people or how have you changed your recruitment process?

So just before starting working with Tim, we had some change up and some, you know, Some people left on their own accord and they were about to have that conversation anyway, so it worked out. Nice timing. But yeah, so we’ve brought on some great people in the last year and now we’re operating from a totally different way of thinking about that with not being held captive and a hostage in my own office. And how do you feel now? I mean, do you and your wife, does it does it feel better? Do you feel have more pride about the business now that you’re more profitable?

Absolutely. I mean, I see the difference in her eyes too. Really? Yeah. I mean, I’ve been a doctor for the last 15 years, but to be a successful doctor is kind of a little better. Right, right.

And so I needed the tangible action steps, like give me a task to do today that I can put my hands to work on doing that. But I mean, I had to borrow money from family members. Thank you, Dad. Big shout out to your dad. I owe you. But yeah, I mean it was tough on my wife.

She’s a schoolteacher and we were we were paycheck to paycheck every month trying to rob Peter to pay Paul. Got it. And not fun. Not fun at all. And you’re a doctor.

You’re a chiropractor. Yeah, it’s embarrassing. Your business does not have to be embarrassing, and you don’t have to feel stuck. But you do have to take action if you want to get unstuck. Thomas Edison has said, and I quote it so many times on the show, vision without execution is hopeless. hallucination.

So if you feel stuck, you feel overwhelmed, you don’t know what to do, just reach out to us today. Just reach out to us today. Go to thrive timeshow . com and schedule a 13 point one -on -one assessment with yours truly. And we can see if we can help you. Again, my name is Clay Clark.

I’m a business coach. Big shout out to Dr. Breck. And as always, we like to end each and every show with a boom. Three, two, one, boom. My name is Joe Lye and I’m with Kirkpatrick & Lye Orthodontics. At Kirkpatrick & Lye Orthodontics, we create beautiful smiles by straightening kids’ teeth and adults’ teeth.

The services that Clay and his team provide would be something like how to get more customers into my business and get the message out that I’m the best orthodontist in Tulsa. He does that by social media. We get the word out through videos and pictures. Being just top of mind awareness as he would always say.

Also how to reach out and create that bond with my referring doctors. He helped me kind of get somebody in house to go out and meet doctors. Helped me kind of continue building that relationship while I do the work. website. The website is so majorly important. We get several patients through our website and what he’s doing is he’s

there’s a certain way that you want your website to look and certain content, because you want call to action items in your website. And we didn’t have that before. So now we get seven or eight new patients just through the website alone. Clay and his team are, I would just say they’re over the top. I mean, nothing is too big. Nothing’s too grand.

for Klay and his staff and his team. I mean, he says, boom, he really means it. I mean, they over -deliver, really, to be honest with you. And they come up with ideas that are just top notch. And if you don’t like something, great, move on. He’ll figure out something that works for your style and your identity.

But I would just say the biggest thing for Klay and his team is they over -deliver. Klay and his team, you know, help kind of create that culture also for your business that, hey, we got to get things done in a timely manner. Holds me accountable to do the certain tasks so that create things in a timely manner. So there is a sense of urgency that he creates just and it’s a lot of it’s just through his enthusiasm. He’s always on the go. So it kind of puts you on that same mindset of, hey, let’s get this done.

Let’s work hard, but let’s also have fun with it. When I went to orthodontic school, we got zero training on marketing. Actually, when we got out of school, when I got out of school 18 years ago, it was kind of taboo to actually do any marketing. The most you could do is put your name in the yellow pages. And so now it’s pretty common knowledge and pretty mainstream to go ahead and get your name out there, tell everybody your story, who you are, what you’re about. If you don’t do that, you’re essentially

leg of your business that you’re lagging behind. Because you could be the best, or the honest, or the best, whatever. But if people don’t know that, then you won’t get the customers coming in. I meet with Clay and his team on every Friday about 11 o ‘clock. And to be honest with you, at the beginning I wasn’t that thrilled with it. coming in every week, just kind of seemed like a lot.

But for me, I find the marketing aspect interesting. I enjoy it. I love working with Clay. I think it’s the main reason why. I’ve kind of built a relationship with him. I think it got to a level now where we’re pretty good friends.

And so to me, it’s enjoyable. I really enjoy the creativity. And when you put the energy into it and the work into it, how everything kind of comes back and it works. I’ve worked with Clay and his team for about, I think it’s about three years. Every year it’s just gotten better and things have grown. I’ve been trying to get my wife and her pediatric dentist office and our partners on board with Clay for a while.

I just saw that they were kind of getting stagnant practice and times were kind of getting slow for them and they needed more referrals. And I knew that Clay could definitely help them out by even just one thing, which would be change a website. Just by doing that, you’re going to get patients very easily. But another thing, too, is that they needed to change their culture and their mindset of how to bring in patients. in patients and creating a brand as well for them and giving them more of an identity so the whole staff could kind of rally around them. For anybody that’s coming out of school or just starting new with a business of any sort, be it medical or anything of that nature, I would highly recommend Clay helping you create that business model.

We’re trained to do what we’re trained to do, but we’re not trained to do the business aspect or the marketing or how to deal with the patient or our staff. So Clay can pretty much do all that. But what I like the most about Clay and his staff is that everything’s in -house. I don’t have to go to one place to do my website. I don’t have to go somewhere to do my videos. I don’t have to go another place to shoot photographs, somewhere else to do web content.

or team coaching or entrepreneurship. Clay pretty much is the total package. He’s really a great mentor. So if you’re new and starting a business and you want to avoid all the pitfalls, I would definitely hook up with Clay and his team. If someone’s not using Clay and his team to help build their business, they’re missing out on a lot. There’s so many details and so many aspects creating a business that Clay really makes it simple.

makes it fun and you learn so much in a short amount of time that I think he’s the best entrepreneur, business coach, marketer, you name it. The guy’s and his team’s got it all going on. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark.

Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017.

He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations.

We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with like Lee Crockrell, head of Disney with the 40 ,000 cast members. He’s friends with like Mike Lindell.

He does reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10 ,000 or more people show up to some of these tours on the day He does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks, he’s doing Reawaken America tours.

Every six to eight weeks, he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 -step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi -millionaires teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy.

He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. And that’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach.

A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. And Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. I was really most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it.

I got to shadow and listen to it. And when we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal. And they were super excited about working with him. And he told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down. Because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run.

And the guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was and do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate any time I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or, you know. navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months.

He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for three months. And you have $350 ,000 of bills you’ve got to pay. And we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that. And of course, we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. He was a great man. I’m very impressed with him.

So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing. And I encourage you, if you haven’t worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s going to help magnify you. And there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does. He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day, and literally the rest of the time he’s working. And he can outwork everybody.

in the room every single day. And he loves it. So anyways, this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank you, Clay. And anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay, it’s a great, great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one.

This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys. I met his goats today. 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? His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing.

Transcribed with Cockatoo